


Our embalmed hearts, our desolate kingdoms

by spooky_bee



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, Angst, F/M, Gen, M/M, Multi, Neon Genesis Evangelion AU, Riza-centric, Slow Build, all ur faves are queer lol, everyone is sad and in giant robots, implied Ed/Winry - Freeform, it should also be titled "roy mustang is really queer and cries a lot", like r e a l l y slow, this fic should be titled "riza hawkeye doesn't talk about her feelings"
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-23
Updated: 2016-01-27
Packaged: 2018-03-18 18:36:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 20
Words: 155,853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3579723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spooky_bee/pseuds/spooky_bee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He leans back, palms connecting with the concrete, and looks up over their city, their desolate kingdom. In the rain, Central City might as well be the ruins of Xerxes, empty and grey, and he and she may as well be the last two people on earth."</p><p>Or, Love in the Time of Giant Robots</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. "The truth doesn't terrify us."

**Author's Note:**

> Alright, friends, this is a Neon Genesis Evangelion AU. As this is a fusion of NGE and FMA, I have taken some pretty significant liberties with both. As a disclaimer, the things I'm drawing from NGE are from the anime and End of Eva specifically, and don't take into account the movies or the manga. On that note, this is also based in the FMA continuity of Brotherhood and, to a lesser extent, the manga. While a prior knowledge of NGE would be cool so you can pick up on some of the references and tweaks to the universe, I don't think it's necessary for an understanding of the fic.
> 
> The title is bastardized from Henry David Thoreau's "Walking": "We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return—prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again—if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk."

Riza Hawkeye is cold. In the two months that she has been aboard the A.M.S. _Flamel_ , this has been her most consistent thought. She knows in the kind of offhand way that all children know things about their parents that her family is well-off. After all, the Hawkeyes are both military-funded researchers, working on something important and secretive. Her childhood (which she is still in, but won't be for long) was comfortable, if a little lonely due to the nature of her parents' work, and their home back in the West is spacious and warm. And yet, despite this, the parka they had provided her for the trip is several sizes too big, and the air in the space between her skin and the fur makes her shiver. She wants to go back inside the ship, but her parents very rarely let her sit with them and observe while they work, so she doesn't want to squander this precious opportunity.

She's not entirely sure what it is that they're researching, exactly, only that it is of importance to the military and it makes everyone speak in very vague, hazy terms. Her parents only let her come along on the condition that she not interfere with their work, and so she's too afraid to ask. Whatever it is has brought them to the sea north of Drachma, which, at this time of year, is dark even during the day, and so Riza spends most of her days in a sleepy fog, as if she had always woken up too early or too late. She tries her best to keep up with her studies on the ship, since she has nothing but free time, but she has to do it alone in her bunk, otherwise the research assistants give her funny looks.

She never really thought much about her upbringing, because it was the only one she had ever known. Her parents never communicated much with their extended family, and so she had no cousins to speak of who she could compare her life with. She never got out much as a child, and if she did she generally stayed on her family's property, and so she very rarely had to even consider the local children who walked to and from school every day. And so her parents taught her stitched together bits and pieces of what they knew and what books they had on hand or could get from the library. She never thought anything of it until she was in the galley working one day and a couple of research assistants happened to come in to brew a pot of coffee.

Most of the research assistants are young, and these two in particular are two pretty young women from Central. For the first few weeks on the ship they had tried to talk with her, probably out of a desire for female companionship amidst all of their male colleagues. But they quickly realized that Riza is not the most talkative and also that she--the twelve-year-old daughter of military researchers, the only child on a ship full of adults and very far away from home--has very little in common with them and their desire for frivolous conversation. She wonders what that's like: her parents abhor frivolous anything, and most of their conversations consist of science and math and politics. Important things. She doesn't know how it feels to have a conversation that, once you leave it, meant nothing.

"So what are you working on?" asked one of the women, the one who still wears lipstick, despite her current environment.

Rather than trying to explain, Riza moves the book she had been taking notes from and her notebook so that they can see.

"My!" exclaimed the second, followed by a quick titter of nervous laughter from her companion. "You're quite advanced, aren't you?"

She heard them talking about her that night as she had crawled out of her bunk to get a glass of water. They were in the galley, the lights dim, a bottle of whiskey (one of the crew's many desperate attempts to keep warm) between them.

"I mean, God," said one, the one with lipstick, taking an exasperated pull from the bottle. "I didn't learn that shit until I was at the university. How old is she?"

"Ten, twelve, I don't know," replied the second. "She should be watching cartoons at home, not freezing her ass off up here and doing linear algebra."

"That probably explains why she's so weird."

Riza felt her cheeks flush.

"How do you mean?"

"It's like she..." The first took a swig from the bottle in contemplation. "She doesn't blink enough, or something. I feel like she's always watching us. She never talks to anyone, she just watches."

"I mean, I doubt you'd be a socialite either if the Hawkeyes were _your_ parents."

"Good point."

In her short life, Riza had very rarely felt embarrassed, but at that moment she felt like a freak. Her life looked so strange through the eyes of others, and now she found that she couldn't get her own sight back.

Shivering on the boat in the middle of the strange day-night, watching her parents look into the depths of the frigid water as if it held answers to something, Riza wonders what life would be like if she had grown up like the research assistants, in a city, surrounded by other children, other girls. Would that have balanced out her parents' strangeness? Would she have grown up to be a normal girl? Would she even have liked it if she had?

Her introspection is interrupted by the sight of the ocean having a fit, suddenly churning and bubbling where before it had been calm and smooth as glass. She, and several others, are tossed to the floor while others cling to the railing in an attempt to keep from being tossed overboard. She thinks that maybe this is a sudden storm, but there's no rain or wind, just water. The ship rights itself only for the whole crew to see what had caused the upset.

Rising out of the sea is a huge, black creature, with giant red eyes and a mouth full of horrifying teeth that fall over its lips, even with its mouth closed. It raises an arm, and Riza sees that it has claws the size of automobiles. In a sudden burst of childish need, she calls out for her mother. Her mother turns to face Riza and so does not see the creature reaching for her.

Riza watches in horror as the creature crushes her mother in its palm.

* * *

She bolts upright, hand instinctively reaching for the handgun under her pillow, but of course there's nothing there save Black Hayate--Amestris's most useless guard dog--snoozing peacefully at the foot of her bed and the sticky blackness of another night in Central. She surveys the room anyway (old habit) before heaving off a sigh, heavy as a bulletproof vest, and lowering her gun. She places the gun carefully back under her pillow and sneaks a look at the clock on her bedside table. It's a little after five in the morning. She has to be up by six anyway, so she decides to go ahead and get up for the day. She scratches Black Hayate's head as she passes out of her room and hears him whine contentedly in his sleep as she closes the door.

The nightmares don't come as often as they used to anymore. In the months directly following the incident on the A.M.S _Flamel_ , she rarely got a full night's sleep. The nightmare was always the same: she would be sitting, chilly but fine, on the ship, and then the next moment she would be watching as the monster killed her mother. The many military psychologists she was shuffled between in the year after she returned to Amestris all told her the same thing: her consciousness had been so strained under the weight of her mother's death that it concocted a sea monster to explain it away. All the reports, they said, pointed to a meteorite colliding with the sea north of Drachma, which explained both the sinking of the A.M.S.  _Flamel_ and the melting of the Drachman ice caps. After all, she was still a child when it happened, and children think in fairytales. 

Although she was never a fan of fairytales and the Hawkeyes never read them to her, she accepted their explanation without much fuss. A meteorite--some unconsciousness piece of space rock--is much less scary than a monster. Though consciously she had accepted this to be fact, she still had the nightmares anyway. And though Berthold Hawkeye told all of them that she was never a child known for having a particularly vivacious imagination, everyone agreed that her dreams were incredibly vivid and detailed. A couple psychologists wanted to write a paper about it, but Berthold told them no. 

She wouldn't find out the truth until four years later.

The years following her mother's death were quiet and lonely. The Hawkeyes' research required them to do quite a bit of travel, but after returning to Amestris, Berthold very rarely left the house. In the same way that she knew unconsciously that her family was well-off when she was a child, as a teenager she began to see that now they were not. Things started breaking and stopped being fixed. At a point the electricity bill stopped being paid, and they began to use candles and oil lamps that they kept in the cellar for light. Just as her mother had died, it was as if their house were dying as well. Berthold spent most of every day (and often well into the night) in his study, trying desperately to salvage the research that had been curtailed with his wife's death, and so Riza very rarely saw him after that.

And yet, just when it seemed that, perhaps, this was going to be what the rest of her life was like, her father hired a new research assistant, and everything began to fall into a kind of normalcy again. The lights came back on. The assistant, despite being somewhat thin and wan for his age, was determined to prove his worth and gratitude for Berthold for not just taking him on, but also housing him, and so set to work repairing the bits of the Hawkeye home that had begun to disintegrate. 

The house had the noise of three pairs of feet again, and Riza was glad that--while still singleminded and unaffectionate--her father seemed to be somewhat engaged with life again. She still had the nightmares, but it had been four years since the A.M.S. _Flamel_ sank off the coast of Drachma, and the memory was beginning to blur around the edges. The monster was now little more than an ominous black mass, rising out of the sea and taking her mother with it. They were still frightening nonetheless, and so every so often they dragged her out of her bed and into the silent kitchen long after the rest of her little household was fast asleep. 

The night that Roy Mustang broke into her father's study was one such night.

She was sitting in the kitchen, reading and drinking a cup of chamomile tea, hoping for exhaustion to untie the knot in her stomach and send her back to sleep. But her nerves were ragged at the edges, and she found herself to be wide awake. She didn't like the quiet of the kitchen at night. It reminded her too much of those ghostly years before Mr. Mustang showed up and brought noise back into their house again. But she didn't want to wake anyone by turning on the radio (the only major piece of electronics their home had; to the day he died, Berthold Hawkeye refused to buy a television or a computer), and so she sat with a book, doing the best she could to keep the silence and darkness at bay.

Perhaps, in a strange sort of way, her prayers were answered, because she heard a pair of feet descending the creaky wooden stairs. This was unusual, as Mr. Mustang was generally early to bed after a day of hard work, and her father almost always retreated straight to bed after staying up late working. She turned sharply in her chair, sloshing a bit of tea onto the floor.

Descending slowly, shakily, was Mr. Mustang, gripping the railing with white knuckles, as if to keep from falling down the stairs.

"Mr. Mustang?" Riza asked cautiously. When he had shown up on their doorstep six months before, Roy Mustang had been quite small for his age, but now, after several months of working on their house and in their garden, he had started to fill out a bit, and the pallor of his skin began to recede. But at that moment, Roy Mustang's face was as pale as she had ever seen it, and his eyes--which had always looked Xingese to Riza, although she never asked--were hollow.

Mr. Mustang reached the bottom of the stairs and sat heavily on the bottom step. "I just broke into your father's study," he said flatly.

Riza's mouth fell open slightly. This seemed so out of character for him. He practically worshipped her father and the work he did, did jobs around the house that he was definitely not equipped for (when he showed up, Riza could beat him arm wrestling, although that was no longer the case), and even respected Berthold's rule to leave Riza be as much as possible. And yet he would betray that to break into her father's study in the middle of the night? More than just rude, it seemed quite bizarre.

"I've been curious for a while," he continued. "About the incident on the A.M.S. _Flamel_. He never talks about it." He let out a dry, hollow chuckle. "And he said specifically never to talk to you about it either." This wasn't surprising. Berthold went out of his way to make sure Riza had to relive that day as little as possible. She had always thought it was a strange, sudden flutter of paternal empathy, but the tone of Mr. Mustang's voice was making her think otherwise. "I couldn't sleep, so I figured tonight would be as good a night as any to sneak in there." He ran a hand through his hair. It had been longer, and would occasionally fall rakishly into his eyes, but he had recently gotten it cut. Riza didn't think it suited him; he looked too much like he was trying to be a grownup, but underneath it all he was still a skinny eighteen-year-old who spent his weekends watering the flowers in their garden and flirting with the girls in town. 

"Tell me, Riza," he said, eyes suddenly meeting hers, sharp and black as crows. She remembered thinking that this was the first time anyone had ever looked at her as if she were an adult. It both thrilled and terrified her. "How did your mother die?"

"If you broke into my father's study, then you should've seen the records," she said, suddenly brave. "The A.M.S.  _Flamel_ was hit by a meteorite in the sea north of Drachma. My father and I were the only survivors."

He smirked in the way he did that made the young girls who worked at the coffeeshops in town--usually students at Western University who needed part-time jobs--giggle. But instead of making her weak in the knees with longing (which, she thought, she had never been before), it made her weak in the knees for a different reason. She was used to being underestimated: by the research assistants on the  _Flamel_ , by the psychologists who interviewed her. They looked at her and saw a fragile little girl, isolated, naïve, and now wracked with grief over the death of her mother. But in reality she knew that she was more than people expected of her. She was strong and very rarely cried, she could do complex math and physics, and could hold her own in a fight if she ever had to. It was both liberating and terrifying to be, for once, simply  _estimated_. 

"Now Riza," Mr. Mustang continued. "You and I both know that's not true."

She swallowed. Though her throat was dry, she figured her tea was probably cold by now. She thought of monsters rising from the sea, of claws larger than human beings, of giant red eyes that seared themselves into her mind and refused to leave. She thought of adults in military garb, purposely offset with affable-looking reading glasses and conciliatory smiles, waving away her memories as fairytales. 

"Riza," he said, grin fading, and suddenly looking much older than eighteen, but much younger at the same time. Riza was struck with their situation: two kids, sitting in a darkened kitchen at night, discussing what sometimes felt like a harbinger of the end of the world. It was almost laughable. "What do you know about Homunculi?"

Of course, now that's common knowledge. Shortly after her father died (which, in itself, was not long after Roy Mustang broke into his study), the military issued a statement about the incident on the A.M.S.  _Flamel_ , saying that the "dedicated research of several highly-regarded scholars has finally turned up an answer to this national tragedy." Riza had been right all along. There was no meteorite. Instead, there was what the military was calling a "Homunculus," so-called for its vaguely humanoid shape. It had been code-named "Greed," and it was believed to still be out there, most likely in the arctic, as it hadn't been apprehended. In order to protect Amestrians from future attacks, the military would be opening a new division, known as the State Alchemist Program. They would be developing a way to keep Amestris safe. _  
_

And did they ever. Many have hailed the Alchemists as mankind's greatest achievement: humanoid robots the size of skyscrapers with the ability to stave off any kind of danger you can imagine, and only the best and brightest can pilot them. 

In this case, "the best and brightest" happens to include Roy Mustang. And Riza needs to get dressed, because Roy Mustang, State Alchemist pilot, needs to be picked up for work.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As far as I know, since it's landlocked, Amestris doesn't have a navy or any sort of maritime branch of its military, so I took the liberty to make one myself. Because of this, "A.M.S." stands for "Amestrian Military Ship." "Flamel" refers to Nicolas Flamel, a fifteenth century scholar believed in various legendary accounts to have successfully found the Philosopher's Stone.
> 
> Chapter title is from "I Am Not Afraid," by Owen Pallett


	2. Pharmakon

It's a little funny, Riza thinks, as she starts her car: Roy Mustang spends a significant amount of his time piloting a giant robot, but he can't drive a car. It isn't for lack of trying, either.  Every time he has asked Riza to teach him, they've almost crashed into something, and he spent the rest of the ride sulking in the passenger seat.

"I don't know how you expect me to be able to drive when I'm so used to synchronizing with the Alchemists," he grumbled. She had never thought of it that way. Being able to control a huge, lumbering piece of metal with your mind does seem to be a lot more efficient than using a steering wheel and pedals. (Although, of course, cars don't feel pain.)

And so it just became routine. Riza tweaked her daily schedule slightly so that she had enough time to wake up, get ready, and pick up Roy while still getting to Central HQ on time. The change wasn't hard (Riza had always been an early riser) aside from the occasional titter they would get from coworkers upon showing up together. Roy always laughed it off.

"As if I could ever be worthy of the radiant Captain Hawkeye," Roy said, digging his hands with practiced nonchalance into his pockets. "And besides." He sidled up to Jean Havoc, leaning toward him conspiratorially. "Do you remember that cute bartender? The redhead from Langley's?" He allows the question to hang in the air just enough for Havoc to grit his teeth before strolling off toward the locker rooms to change into his plug suit. 

Just as he intended, Havoc went trailing after him. "Come on, Roy! Not again! I  _told_ you I liked her!"

While Roy's method may be more fun to watch, Riza's is more economical. If she hears any gossip or giggles, all she has to do is look the perpetrators in the eye and casually brush her hand along her jacket, moving it to reveal the gun at her thigh. That shuts them right up.

All in all, the jokes have gradually died out, and now the only one who ever makes any wink-wink-nudge-nudge remarks is Maes Hughes, and she figures that he has the right to. After all, he and Roy had dated briefly right after Roy and Riza had moved out to Central, so she feels that if anyone has the right to humiliate them for their somewhat bizarre arrangement, Maes does.

Roy's apartment building isn't far. His building is identical to hers, as most of the new apartment buildings are. In the refugee boom coming after the destruction of Ishval and parts of the Eastern quadrant by the Homunculus "Gluttony," Central became a city of refugees and orphans. She realizes, as she takes the elevator up to Roy's floor--the forty-seventh of fifty--that, aside from their military assignment with the Alchemists, she and Roy are no different.

She knocks, and waits. Roy has never been a morning person, not even back when he was living with her and her father, and less so now. She's never surprised when he doesn't answer on the first knock, and so she knocks again. When he doesn't answer this time, she begins to get annoyed. 

"Mustang," she calls between beats on the door. "We have to go, come on."

When this still renders nothing but silence, Riza reaches into the pocket of her jacket and pulls out her military-issue cell phone. She has a bit of her father's backwardness with technology, and so she thinks that if the military didn't require it of her, she wouldn't have a cell phone at all. Roy on the other hand, after spending his adolescence in the isolated West with the somewhat idiosyncratic Hawkeyes, got to Central and drank in all the tech with wide, greedy eyes. His phone is the newest thing, just a plane of metal and glass, and he jokes that it's a good thing Riza doesn't know how to use it, otherwise she would see all of his drunk selfies.

Her phone, unlike Roy's, is still old enough to have keys, and so calling up Roy is easy enough. He's speed-dial number one. 

After several rings, he picks up. "Hullo?" he slurs groggily.

"Were you still sleeping?" Riza asks, managing to keep her voice level despite her irritation. She knows that she's scarier when she's not telegraphing her anger, so she doesn't.

"Shh..." Roy soothes into the phone. "Not so loud...my head...ugh."

Despite herself, her eyes widen a bit. "Mustang, are you  _hungover?_ " He doesn't reply, so she knows she's right. As opposed to chewing him out, which she would really enjoy, she simply says "Let me in."

And he does. She's glad they're on the forty-seventh floor so that no one but the CCTV cameras can see the state Roy is in this morning. He opens the door, squinting despite the milky, early morning sunlight, wearing nothing but boxers and a scowl. His hair, which could do with a cut, is mussed and, for a moment, he looks no different than the skinny little teenager who stumbled into her father's house one afternoon, begging to be taken on by the great Berthold Hawkeye, PhD. He moves silently from the doorway so that Hawkeye can slip in past him.

Wordlessly, she moves about the kitchen, filling the coffeemaker with water and reaching into the familiar cabinets to grab coffee and filters. Roy stands dumbly in the middle of the kitchen, as if expecting her to say something.

"Your clothes won't put themselves on," is all she says, flicking the coffeemaker on authoritatively. He nods at her, and she half-expects a "Yes, ma'am" before he pads off to his room.

It's times like this that it's easy to forget that she's technically his superior. It's an odd position to be in, as he is two years her senior, and a part of her feels like she's always the one doing the following, not the other way around. But, for all military intents and purposes, she outranks him significantly. Alchemist pilots may as well be equipment. Though they receive training on how to maneuver, use the Alchemists' weapons, and defeat Homunculi, they aren't supposed to act without the orders of a superior office, which in this case happens to be her. Though it's strange, she feels like this evens their footing somewhat. She may have followed him her entire adolescence, even followed him into the military and Central and the State Alchemist Program, but at the end of the day he has to answer to her. After a childhood of feeling completely helpless, she can't deny that having this kind of power is a little bit fun.

"Do I have time for a shower?" Roy asks from his small bedroom as he rummages hopelessly through his room for clean clothes.

Although the layouts of their apartments are exactly the same, if one were to walk into Riza Hawkeye's apartment and then Roy Mustang's, you would think they were completely different. Roy's apartment was always a mess, cramped with books, papers, empty containers of convenience store food, dirty clothes, at least ten different ash-trays, half-full cartons of cigarettes, and all manner of other  _stuff._ Because of this, his apartment felt much smaller than it actually was, and maneuvering was akin to walking through a minefield so that you didn't step on something unfortunate. Riza's, on the other hand, was spartan, a vestigal instinct leftover from the days where it was her responsibility to keep the Hawkeye house clean. Now it just stuck. Clutter makes her anxious, and cleaning is a good way to clear your head. Roy, as evidenced by his brow knit tight with a headache and his hair a bird's nest from falling into bed probably no large number of hours before Riza showed up at his door, has other methods of dealing with stress.

"I'm afraid not," Riza says, managing to find two relatively clean thermoses in a cabinet and fills them both with coffee. She remembers when they moved to Central and Roy decided he was going to start taking his coffee black "like a man." That impulse lasted maybe a week, before he finally accepted that he likes his coffee light and sweet as melted ice cream. Riza, on the other hand, likes her coffee dark, and she likes it to burn. "We're already running late."

She hears a groan from his room.

"Maybe if you have time you can grab a shower in the locker room at HQ."

"Fine," he says, and slouches out of his room. His hair's still a mess, but at least he's got pants and a shirt on. The shirt is for a band that Riza doesn't recognize, which is no surprise to her. Despite hating this in her father as a child, Riza is something of a homebody now. If she isn't at HQ, chances are she's in her apartment with her dog, Black Hayate, although she occasionally will go out for drinks with Olivier and Rebecca. Roy, however, blossomed upon moving into the city. He completely threw himself into everything that Central had to offer: music, tech, food, clubs, bars, you name it. If it weren't for his phone, she doubts she'd ever be able to get a hold of him outside of work, as he's hardly ever home. They've been in Central a while now, and Mustang has made quite a name for himself among the city's young and single. (And occasionally not so single; that's a fun story to tell at office parties.) Riza's life is quiet, but it's not lonely, so she doesn't mind it.

She hands him the thermos of coffee and he accepts it as if it were water and he were wandering through the middle of the desert. "What would I do without you?"

"Die, maybe," Riza responds, re-shouldering her bag. "Get fired, definitely."

"You're probably right," he says, and slips on a pair of sunglasses before they're even so much as out the door.

* * *

The drive to Central HQ lasts about half an hour, and is the favorite part of Riza's day. The city is so quiet and safe-looking that early in the morning, everyone snug in their beds. Watching the sun crest over the Central skyline was something that took her breath away on her first day in the city, and still continues to do so. The fact that there even is a skyline is an adjustment from her home back in the West, where there was at least a mile between her and any of her neighbors. Most of these drives are silent, with Roy trying to grab a little bit of extra sleep before another long day in the Alchemist. 

Today, however, she won't give him the pleasure.

"You just  _had_ to go on a bender the night before the new pilot shows up?"

For a second she thinks he's asleep and didn't hear her. He's curled up in some vague approximation of the fetal position in the passenger seat, tangled in the seatbelt and clutching the thermos of coffee like a life preserver. He must be awake however, because he manages to croak out a "What?"

"Edward Elric arrives at Central HQ this morning," Riza says. "According to Fuery, he got into Central sometime last night. He was going to stay in a hotel provided by the Program, but apparently Maes intercepted him before he could and put him up at his and Gracia's place."

Roy makes a groan akin to a death rattle. " _Fuck_. I completely forgot. What a fantastic first impression I'm going to make."

Riza was the one who had gone out to Resembool--or what was left of it, anyway--to go and scout the boy three years prior. And that's really what he was: a boy. At the time he had been twelve and the talk of the town. While Resembool was by no means close to Ishval, quite a lot of the Eastern quadrant was decimated while the Alchemists were trying to intercept Gluttony, and Resembool was no exception. Edward and his younger brother Alphonse had been living with their mother--when questioned about their father they always simply said that they didn't know where he was, followed by some impressively colorful curses considering their young age--at the time. Most of Resembool had left, but it was far enough away from the conflict that it hadn't been issued a government evacuation warning. Because of that, only those who had the means to do so managed to leave, and the Elrics weren't particularly wealthy, and so they stayed.  

Gluttony is not an illustrious chapter in the history of the State Alchemist Program. It had showed up, and the three Alchemists at the time--the Strong Arm Alchemist, piloted by Alex Louis Armstrong; the Crimson Lotus Alchemist, piloted by Solf J Kimblee; and the Flame Alchemist, piloted by Mustang--were deployed, but had difficulty intercepting it, particularly since its modus operandi seemed to be consuming literally everything in sight. What should have only lasted a couple of days stretched into months, and by the end of it, Ishval, and parts of the Eastern quadrant, was nothing more than a smoldering rubbish heap. 

The government had almost pulled the Program's funding after that, particularly after one especially unsavory incident. Everyone acknowledged that there were dangers in having living humans beings synchronize their minds with an, essentially, omnipotent machine. It was rarely an issue, except when it was. "When it was" refers, specifically, to Solf J Kimblee, who synchronized too far with his Alchemist and lost his mind. When asked, the other members of the Program agreed that Kimblee was never the most sound of mind to begin with, and always had a bit of a sadistic streak, but no one expected something like this to happen. Because of this, the conflict lasted twice as long as it should have: first to apprehend Gluttony, and then Kimblee. 

When they managed to get a hold of him, they intended to send Kimblee to a psychiatric ward for observation, but they found that he was no longer in his plug, and that his body had separated into all of its component elements. The Crimson Lotus Alchemist was decommissioned after that, just to be safe.

During the conflict, however, the Elrics' house got destroyed, killing their mother. It almost killed them too, but Edward risked his life to get his brother out safely, losing an arm and a leg in the process. 

Riza met him not long after that. They were living with a family friend who, conveniently, was an automail mechanic and fitted the boy with a pair of prosthetic limbs. It wasn't simply the boy's bravery that piqued Riza's interest. Bravery happens all the time in the face of war. It was the fact that, at twelve, he had applied to attend Eastern University and, remarkably, had been accepted. Bravery and intelligence on their own weren't hard and fast indicators that someone could succeed as an Alchemist pilot, but they were definitely good enough signs to send Riza out to the ruins of Resembool.

The boy had agreed to join the Program on the condition that he could attend university first, and she had allowed him that. She wasn't going to completely rob him of his adolescence; that wasn't her place. But his four years were up, and--chemistry degree in hand--he was now in Central, ready to pilot.

"I may be able to buy you some time so that you can at least take a shower," Riza says. "Just be sure to be out and ready by the time he does his first synch test, okay?"

"Yes, captain," he says drily, and falls back asleep almost instantly.

* * *

Everyone expected Edward Elric to be at Central HQ that morning. Riza just hadn't expected him to bring an entourage. 

Edward Elric himself looks, essentially, no different than he had the last time she had seen him, aside from having grown out his hair. The effect is almost eerie. People talk a lot about traumatic events ending someone's childhood, but on Edward Elric the effect is particularly physical. He doesn't seem to have grown. He also doesn't look like it's his first day on the job. If anything, he looks like he wants to be anywhere but here. He's got hands dug far into the pockets of a pair of jeans that are cuffed too many times at the ankles and a scowl on his face that contrasts laughably with the boy next to him.

It takes her a minute, but she eventually recognizes the boy as Edward's younger brother, Alphonse. Unlike his brother, he has grown, and is surprisingly broad about the shoulders for a boy who should, if Riza remembers correctly, be no more than fourteen. He's smiling brightly, looking around the building excitedly, like a child on a field trip.

At least his presence makes sense. One of the things that stuck out most in Riza's memory of going to talk with the older Elric was how much the two brothers seemed to be joined at the hip. In particular, Alphonse's devotion to his older brother was fierce. She has no idea if they were like that to begin with, but after Edward lost two of his limbs in the process of saving his life, Alphonse's sense of obligation was apparent.  _No_ , Riza thinks.  _Obligation isn't the right word. You're obligated to take out the trash. What he feels isn't obligation, it's love_. 

The third member of their party is where Riza begins to feel a bit confused. She recognizes the girl immediately to be Winry Rockbell. She's had the girl's face burned into her memory for four years, because they had had an extensive conversation over tea while Edward was filling out paperwork. The girl had cried through most of it. She remembered Winry's pretty long hair, a shade or two lighter than her own, and decided to grow her own hair out after that. She knows that the Rockbells were close with the Elrics--Winry and her grandmother took in the boys after their house was destroyed, and even paid for Edward to get automail limbs out of their own pockets--but coming with them here seems a bit...extreme.

If anyone else thinks so, they're not letting on. In fact, Hughes is standing proudly behind them, as if they were his own children.

"I didn't expect to see you here, Maes," Riza says placidly.

"I could say the same for you," says Maes, returning Riza's smile with an equally sphinx-like grin. "Or rather, I didn't expect to see you here without a certain someone..."

Despite the innuendo, Riza's smile is unwavering. She directs her gaze from Hughes down to the Elrics and their friend, who look more than slightly puzzled by the exchange.

"So, how are you finding Central so far?" Riza asks.

"It's amazing!" says Alphonse brightly. "There are so many buildings and people. Last night, Mr. Hughes even took us to the main branch of the Central library!"

"I  _told_ you," Maes says, clasping the boy gently on the shoulder. "Call me  _Maes_."

"And Mr. Hughes's wife, Gracia, is an amazing cook," says Winry, ignoring Maes completely. "She made the most amazing quiche."

"And what about you, Edward?" Riza asks. He has stood resolutely silent for the entire conversation.

"It's fine, I guess," he says begrudgingly. Winry and Alphonse both shoot him disappointed glares, to which he finally concedes "The library was cool. A lot bigger than the one back at Eastern."

"I'm glad to know you're settling in well," Riza says. "We'll sort out the details of your living arrangement later..." She casts a wary eye over Winry and Alphonse. "...but, as for now, there is work to be done. If you'll follow me, I'll take you to the locker room and we'll get you fitted into your plug suit."  _And hopefully Mustang will be out of the shower by then and not frighten the kid off,_ she thinks.

She begins to walk down the silent corridor. They had shown up before most of the technicians and scientists in order to not force Edward to have to make too many introductions just yet. They would all be in later that afternoon to watch his first synch test with an Alchemist, but this early in the morning, Central HQ is practically empty. The kids fall into their own cluster several feet behind her, which is understandable. She's never been told she was the most approachable or maternal person in the world. They have every right to be slightly suspicious of her.

Maes, however, jogs quickly up to her and matches her pace. "About that," he says.

"About what?"

"Their living arrangements."

"Can we talk about this later?" she asks, casting an eye back at the kids, who don't seem to be paying them much mind.

"What if they stayed with us?" Maes asks. 

"Maes--"

"You've seen those military-issue apartments," he continues. "Hell, you live in one! They're not exactly  _homey_."

"They're not supposed to be  _homey_ , Maes, they're supposed to be  _efficient_."

"They're just kids, Riza..."

"Later, Maes."

"Riza--"

She fixes him with one of her glares. She doesn't look at him like this often, because she likes Maes. Not that she doesn't like the rest of her subordinates, but she has a special kind of respect and affection for Maes. He was good to Roy, and still is, even though they haven't dated for almost six years. Roy was the best man in Maes and Gracia's wedding, and is listed as little Elicia's godfather. The problem with Maes (if you want to call it that) is that he's too good, and this occasionally leads to him wanting things that are unrealistic. " _Later_ ," she says, and she can hear the chatter behind them stopping.   _Fantastic_ , she thinks.  _They probably already hate me._

* * *

Several hours after the Elrics had arrived, HQ is a flurry of activity, and is even more full of gossip than usual. The State Alchemist Program is not particularly large, despite its rather massive undertaking, and so has become somewhat insular. Because of this, new arrivals are always a big event. 

"Is he cute?" Rebecca Catalina asks over a cup of coffee. 

"He's fifteen," Riza responds.

Rebecca scowls. "Dammit! The first new man we get here in years, and he's not even a man yet!"

"I'm terribly sorry for your loss," quips Olivier Armstrong drily as she walks past, coat swishing behind her. Colonel Olivier Mira Armstrong is one of Riza's two superior officers. Riza has to answer to Olivier, who herself has to answer to General King Bradley, the man responsible for the State Alchemist Program in the first place. She remembers vaguely hearing her parents talk about him when they were working on the  _Flamel_ , but only in the vaguest of terms. She finds it hard, now, to reconcile those hazy memories (situated so closely with the still-raw, even after all these years, image of her mother being crushed to death by a homunculus) with the man as she sees him now. He's a somewhat affable figure, given to wearing horrible tropical-print shirts to office parties and bragging about his adopted son, Selim. Though he drives a tight ship, he also jokes, and sends fruit baskets if any of the technicians or pilots are out sick. His eyepatch and stern-looking mustache are the only things that smack of the military about him, and even then, he always dresses up as a pirate for Halloween. Olivier is much more the disciplinarian, and rightfully strikes fear into the hearts of all the men of the State Alchemist Program. As for the women, she, Rebecca, and Riza had become drinking buddies somewhere down the road. Though she understood it, Riza found it hard to be scared of Olivier now.

Riza watches as Olivier takes her place next to General Bradley at the top deck of Central HQ's main observation theater, arms squared behind her back, spine straight and stiff as a blade. General Bradley is seated, his exposed eye glinting happily, a pleased smile playing along his lips.

The Alchemist technicians are buzzing around, performing final tweaks on the brand new Alchemist: Fullmetal. This Alchemist has none of the obvious specialties that the other two--Flame and Strong Arm--possess. The Flame Alchemist is equipped with a flamethrower in each massive hand, whereas the Strong Arm Alchemist is huge and nearly impenetrable, with large, spiked knuckles. Fullmetal is slighter, smaller, and built for speed and agility. As effective as Flame and Strong Arm are, neither is particular quick, and that has nearly cost Mustang and Armstrong their lives in the past. Fullmetal is meant to be an evolution of the Alchemist series, and also a way to round out their team: Strong Arm is a tank, Flame has (to pardon the pun) the firepower, and now Fullmetal will be ready for close combat. If another homunculus comes, they'll be unstoppable.

At least, Riza hopes so.

"Where's Sparky?" asks Jean Havoc, a technician and friend of Mustang's, around a cigarette as Riza waves Rebecca goodbye to assume her post. Mustang and Havoc had initially bonded over being the only two people in the whole of the Program who had ever gone out for smoke breaks. They both realized, at a certain point, that no one would stop them from smoking inside, but neither of them ever remembered to bring an ashtray. Because of this, all sort of concave objects became unfortunate receptacles, such as people's coffee cups, or pen holders. 

"How should I know?" asks Riza, casting a glance at Kain Fuery. He was the last new addition before Edward Elric showed up, and still has yet to lose his baby-faced, fresh-out-of-university look. He wrinkles his nose every time Havoc smokes, but has the computer next to his and has never asked to move. 

"He is your ball and chain, after all," says Havoc with his trademark lopsided grin. Havoc may be cute, but he's not half the womanizer he thinks he is, and is painfully aware of the fact. When it comes to eligible, single men from the Program, he always plays second fiddle to Mustang. His smirk does nothing for Riza.

"You should know," Riza says, taking up an empty chair and surveying the Fullmetal Alchemist with appreciation. 

"Should I?" Havoc asks.

"You went out with him last night, didn't you?" At this point, Riza just assumed that if Mustang went out, Havoc went with him. As both are approaching thirty, they're both clinging to their youth with iron fists, and go out frequently. They have a funny kind of symbiosis: if Havoc finds a cute girl, Mustang always manages to snatch her up before Havoc can try. (Which is to say nothing of cute boys, which is an area outside of Havoc's realm of expertise.)

"Nope," says Havoc, tapping his cigarette absently into a coffee cup that, judging by the resulting squeak, belongs to Fuery.  _Poor kid_ , Riza thinks.

Riza makes an inquisitive humming noise in the back of her throat. Roy may still be a bit wild, but he's not one to go out alone.

"You know what the say about the wild Mustang, Captain," says Havoc with a chuckle. "No one yet has been able to break that stallion. And me," he makes a show of loudly cracking his back. "I think I'm getting a bit too old for his shenanigans, myself."

Riza doesn't have much time to mull over this information, because the wild Mustang himself is suddenly before her, still wearing sunglasses, but also smelling distinctly of the cheap shampoo they keep stocked in the locker rooms. He is tucked under the arm of Alex Louis Armstrong, pilot of the Strong Arm Alchemist, who is beaming. They're a striking pair at the moment: hungover, slightly damp Roy Mustang, in his too-tight dark jeans and band shirt, tucked like a doll into the side of the massive, silk-and-cravat-wearing Alex Louis Armstrong. The effect is comical.

"Hello, Armstrong," says Riza smugly, looking at the still-disheveled Mustang.

"Hello, Captain!" Armstrong replies brightly. He practically sparkles. "I have taken the liberty of retrieving Mr. Mustang so that he may watch as we welcome a new pilot into our fold!"

She's always liked Armstrong, much to his older sister's chagrin. "I appreciate that. Where was he?"

"Asleep on a bench in the locker room. After the young Mr. Elric had already been fitted into his plug suit, thankfully."

"Thankfully, indeed." Even with the sunglasses, Riza can tell that Mustang is glaring at her. Riza hooks a finger around the back of a chair and drags it next to her own. "Just set him down here, if you don't mind." Armstrong nods sharply and drops Mustang into the chair. He groans pitifully, but seems ultimately unharmed. "You could at least take off those sunglasses," Riza says quietly. Mustang is, like all the other pilots, her responsibility, and she doesn't want the brass thinking poorly of her just because he decided to go out partying. Begrudgingly, Mustang acquiesces and hooks the sunglasses on the neck of his shirt. "Thank you," Riza says sincerely, dropping a bit of her military facade, just for a moment. Mustang notices, and cracks a small smile.

A moment later, across the pane of glass separating the observation theater from the Alchemist dock, they see Edward Elric striding onto the platform leading to the Fullmetal Alchemist's entry plug. His plug suit, like all plug suits, is personalized: red and black (as per Edward's request), featuring the Fullmetal Alchemist's insignia emblazoned on the back, a cross with a snake wrapped around it, below a crown and a pair of wings.

Looking at him across a massive pane of glass, standing next to the Alchemist, he looks even smaller than he usually does, which is saying something. He looks like a child.

Riza grabs the microphone from her desk. "Alright, Edward. Are you ready to start the synch test?" The jovial, busy atmosphere in the observation theater has dissipated and been replaced by a mood of quiet anticipation. Riza feels it especially, coiling tight and snake-like in her belly. If this fails, if Edward can't synch with the Alchemist, or synchs too much and they had another Kimblee situation on their hands, this would fall on her head. And while she's sure Edward himself would be just as happy going back to Eastern and probably pursuing a quiet career in academia, he did bring his family out here. To turn back now, after working so hard, wouldn't just be a disappointment for her.

She looks to her right, past the row of computers and desks, to where Maes is standing with Alphonse and Winry. Though Alphonse is still wearing a face of gleeful excitement, she can tell that he feels the shift in atmosphere too. Winry, however, has her face scrunched up seriously, hands balled into tight fists at her sides. It makes Riza feel a bit guilty that, once the test is over and this spectacle segues back into the day-to-day work of the Program, she's going to have to break it to them that they can't stay in Central.

On the platform she can see Edward nod. She sends a signal to the two technicians assigned to help him into the entry plug, Denny Brosh and Maria Ross. They're both a bit high-strung and given to anxiety, and for a second she wonders if maybe she shouldn't have assigned them to such an important job, but for once they seem calm. Edward climbs into the plug with little fuss, and even through the glass, Riza can hear the hiss of steam as the plug is sealed shut. The pilot camera inside the plug pops up on Riza's computer monitor and she can see Edward, still scowling, but looking oddly at peace.

"Alright, Edward," Riza says into the microphone. "We're going to lower the entry plug into the Alchemist now." He nods, but doesn't say anything. If he's nervous at all, Riza can't tell. Riza signals to Brosh and Ross, and they salute back as they press and pull the required mechanisms to lower the plug into the Alchemist. It screws shut, and the piece of metal securing it within the nape of the Alchemist's neck seals.

"Comfortable?" Riza asks Edward.

"As comfortable as I can be in this damn suit," he says, plucking at the material clinging even to his spindly chest.

"There's not much we can do about that, I'm afraid," says Riza, leaning back in her chair and crossing her legs. "And things are about to get a lot more uncomfortable. If you're ready, we're going to flood the entry plug with PSL now."

"You're going to what--"

Before Edward can protest too much, Riza nods to Heymans Breda. He's no pilot's favorite person in the weeks following initial acceptance into the Program, as he is tasked with the unpleasant business of handling PSL dispersion into the entry plugs. Riza watches on the pilot cam as the plug floods with the viscous, bloody liquid and Edward begins to gasp.

"You're not drowning," Riza assures him into the microphone. "Just breathe normally. You need to allow the PSL into your lungs in order to synchronize with the Alchemist."

Edward still looks panicked, but does as he's told, and his expression changes from one of fear to one of comical confusion.

"What the fuck?" Edward gasps.

Fuery's eyes widen behind his glasses. As his primary job is maintaining communication channels between the Program and the Alchemist pilots, he looks at the sound waves of Edward's curse on his computer screen as if they have personally affronted him.

Mustang snorts next to her, and she jabs a quick elbow into his ribs. 

"Just a reminder that you are on a public communication channel," Riza says blithely.

The initial shock of the PSL has subsided as Edward smirks and says "Then I'll have to be more creative next time."

"This kid's a little shit," Mustang mumbles next to her.

"Like you're one to talk," she responds, before turning back to the pilot cam. "Alright, if you're all settled, we'll start the synch test now."

Edward nods briskly. "Ready when you are."

She turns to Havoc. "Alright, begin the synchronization test."

"Aye, aye, Captain," Havoc says, giving a jaunty salute and typing commands into his computer.

"Alright, Edward," Riza says into the microphone. "Just try to clear your mind as much as possible. The more you stress--"

Edward scoffs. "Who's stressed? I took Organic Chemistry at thirteen; now  _that_ was stressful."

Riza smiles despite herself.  _Maybe this kid will make it after all_. 

"Well, don't worry if this doesn't come naturally to you," Riza continues. "It took Mustang over here a full three months to synch up with his."

Mustang reaches over and turns her microphone off. "Don't tell the kid that! I'm his elder, he should respect me."

"Respect is something you should earn," she responds coolly, turning the microphone back on. "Sorry about that--"

"Uh, Captain?" Havoc asks.

"What is it, Havoc?"

"I think you should have a look at this."

Riza rises from her chair, going to lean over Havoc's monitor. Her eyes widen. "This can't be right..." She turns around to another row of computers. "Falman!"

Vato Falman, a somewhat wizened technician who has been with the Program almost since its inception, rises from his chair. "Yes, Captain?"

"Is the SAGE system functioning normally?"

"Yes ma'am," Falman responds. "All systems are behaving in a standard manner."

She knits her brows, leaning back over Havoc's monitor. "That can't be right. There's no way..."

"Has the kid already messed up that badly?" Mustang asks with a chuckle. 

"Not quite," Riza responds. "Come look."

Mustang wanders lazily over to Havoc's monitor and, looking at it, lets out a string of colorful curses in surprise. 

"You did say the kid was a genius," Havoc responds. He hasn't been paying attention to his cigarette, and the long stick of ash that has accumulated at the tip falls off ungracefully and lands on the desk. No one moves to sweep it up.

Standard synch rates for beginner pilots ranged from 0% to the low teens. Mustang hit a plateau at 16% and was stuck there for weeks before pulling it up to an adequate percentage. 30% was necessary to pilot, but required more interface on the part of technicians, and that usually took weeks or even months of training. While it took Mustang three months to synch sufficiently with his Alchemist, it took Armstrong over half a year to do the same. She knows that Mustang has a thick skin, and much of their relationship is built upon good-natured ribbing. Armstrong is a gentle soul though, despite the muscles, and she doesn't get any joy out of poking fun at him. She's sure he gets more than enough of that from his sister.

What she sees on Havoc's screen is unheard of, however. Despite never having sat in an Alchemist before, Edward Elric's synchronization rate is sitting at 47.3%, which is more than enough to pilot, and would only require minimal intervention from the technicians.

After taking a moment to compose herself, she turns to where Alphonse and Winry are still waiting in anticipation with Maes. "Your brother's a natural!" 

The look of absolute joy on both of their faces only makes the guilt in her stomach twist more. Maes isn't smiling, and is instead holding hard eye contact with her, like he knows what she's feeling. She looks away.

* * *

 

The atmosphere is celebratory after that, everyone wanting to congratulate the State Alchemist Program's new "boy genius." With so many people running around, it's easy to get swept to one side of the crowd, and that is where Maes finally finds her.

"Is now 'later' enough for you?" he asks, holding a coffee mug full of something dark and strong that Havoc had procured from a desk drawer. He had given Riza an apologetic look, but instead of saying anything, she simply moved her own cup over toward the bottle. She doesn't have much, only a couple fingers' worth, because, after all, she does have to drive herself and Roy home once all of this is over.

She sighs. "I guess so."

"Let them come live with me and Gracia," he pleads.

"I can't do that, Maes," she says, taking a swig, relishing the sweetness at the back of her tongue and the burn down her throat. It's been a while since she's had anything stronger than coffee to drink.

"Why not? We've got more than enough room."

"Edward Elric has to be on military property for security reasons, you know that. Edward Elric, and _only_ Edward Elric. I don't know why he brought his brother and his friend, but they can't stay."

"How old are you, Riza?" Maes asks suddenly.

"Twenty-seven. Why?"

"Do you remember what it's like to be their age?"

In all seriousness, not really. She remembers her childhood, and she remembers being twelve, shivering on the _Flamel_ up in the middle of arctic nowhere. She remembers her mother dying. The four years between that and when Roy Mustang showed up all blended into a kind of soup in her memory. For her, being fourteen or fifteen both feel the same, and they don't feel like much.

"Sort of," she says, for the sake of concision.

"Wouldn't you be terrified to move out to the biggest city in the country by yourself at that age? Or watching your brother or your best friend do the same?"

"You've gone soft, Maes."

He smiles a bit sadly. "Fatherhood'll do that to you."

She turns her eyes over to where Edward, Alphonse, and Winry are in the middle of the festivities. Havoc has been trying to give Edward whiskey for the past half hour, but every time he tries Winry knocks it out of his hands and shouts something about trying to corrupt a minor. Alphonse and Fuery have struck up a conversation about the comm system, and for once Fuery is able to talk to someone about it who actually cares. Edward is standing a little taller than before, his posture more upright, and he looks proud of himself.

"Alphonse and Winry need to go home," Riza says quietly.

"To what home?" Maes asks. "Edward is all the home Alphonse has anymore, and the Elrics are practically Winry's family. She's personally taken on their safety as her obligation, and I don't know if you know, but she's got a wicked right hook." He places a gentle hand on her shoulder. Maes has a few years on her and Mustang, but they've always interacted as if that wasn't the case. Now, though, it's like Maes is looking down at her from the other side of a precipice she can't fathom. He's living a very different kind of adulthood than she is, and she knows that this is what they've both chosen. That was made perfectly clear when he broke it off with Mustang; he said he couldn't handle being in love with someone who, every time they went to work, you could never be sure if they'd come back. Maes's job was relatively cushy and boring, by Riza's standards, but it was certainly safer than that of a pilot. Gracia Hughes had little to worry about when Maes went off to work in the morning. Riza thinks that sort of life would bore her to death.

"What would you do if your only family left and you had no idea if they'd ever make it back to you in one piece?"

Riza doesn't have to speculate. She knows from experience. "I'd follow them."

Maes looks at her funnily for a moment before cracking a small, sad smile. "Then there's your answer."

Riza shoots back the rest of her whiskey and sets her mug down on a nearby desk in order to dull the sudden impact of her hasty decision. "They can't live with you, though. Those are regulations. They have to be on military-owned property."

"What are you suggesting?"

Riza sighs and cracks her neck. It's been a long day, and she's tired, and would honestly love to just soak in the bath for a few years, but her day is only about to get longer. "They'll have to stay with me, I suppose." 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> On Roy, Ed, and Armstrong not wearing military uniforms: going off of Eva rules, it seems that only NERV technicians and scientists wear uniforms. Shinji, Rei, and Asuka generally showed up to NERV in their school uniforms and then put on plug suits, so I didn't put Roy or Ed in a uniform. Also it's fun to think of what Roy would wear if he were bopping around in contemporaneity. Also, I'm fairly certain that in Eva none of the pilots have a military rank, and so, to keep with the theme, none of the Alchemist pilots do either.
> 
> "Pharmakon" is a Greek word meaning, among other things, both "remedy" and "poison." The philosopher Plato wrote on it extensively, both in his "Republic" as well as in the dialogue "Phaedrus." In his essay "Dissemination/Plato's Pharmacy," the philosopher Jacques Derrida writes this of the pharmakon as it appears in the "Phaedrus": "One must indeed be aware of the fact that Plato is suspicious of the pharmakon in general, even in the case of drugs used exclusively for therapeutic ends, even when they are wielded with good intentions, and even when they are as such effective. There is no such thing as a harmless remedy. The pharmakon can never be simply beneficial."


	3. Möbius strip

"So," Olivier says, taking a surprisingly dainty sip from her drink. "How are the joys of motherhood?"

"You're hilarious, Olivier. You really should've considered a career in comedy; your talents are being wasted in the military."

After ferrying Mustang and Edward back to their respective abodes, Riza has gone out to a bar near Olivier's apartment. Rebecca couldn't make it, something about having to squeeze an extra night of exercise in before a big date that weekend, but Riza doesn't mind. She loves Rebecca; other than Mustang, Rebecca is her oldest friend, but she's a bit much, especially after the kind of day she had just had. Olivier, when she isn't going out of her way to bring the fear of God down upon everyone, is a much more steadying presence, and requires less of her. 

The scene, she imagines, would be strange to look at for anyone who only knew Olivier from the program. Whenever they went out en masse (which used to happen more back when Mustang and Maes were dating, before Maes married Gracia), Olivier always ordered bourbon, neat, and made a show of being able to drink every man on the Program under the table and out the door, too. But when she was relaxing, with just Riza and Rebecca, she preferred fruity drinks the color of cheap nail polish, occasionally with small umbrellas or curly straws.

"I'm being serious, though," says Olivier, leaning her arms onto the small table. The bar is next-to-empty, which is why they picked it. Olivier, being Olivier, gets pestered a lot by drunk men, or sober men, or simply men at all. Because of this, they tend to find places where they can talk quietly and with little interruption. (Although, once, Olivier did take Riza out to one of the gay clubs she used to frequent when she was younger. It was an interesting experience.) "How are the little brats holding up?"

Riza has the knee-jerk reaction to tell her that they aren't brats, but then thinks that maybe she's had a bit too much to drink. "As could be expected, I guess. The Elrics had lived with the Rockbells for a while before they came out here, so it's not strange for them and Winry to be sharing an apartment. Well," she amends, "not strange for them, anyway."

"You keep on eye on them," Olivier cautions. "It's painfully clear that the short one and the girl like each other. And at that age?" She takes a contemplative sip from her drink, as if her remembering her own youthful exploits.

Riza had noticed, of course, the obvious tension between Winry and Edward, but she doesn't think they have yet. Edward is too preoccupied with his pilot training, and Riza had helped Winry with the paperwork to get into a local school that has a good engineering program. Winry vowed, upon Riza letting her examine Edward's Alchemist one afternoon, that she was going to go to university and then come back to the Program, to be a technician. They'd both been so busy with their own goings-on that she doubts they have the time or the energy to start up a romance while she isn't looking. And even if they did, she's their guardian, not their mother, regardless of what Olivier says. It's none of her business what they do, as long as Edward shows up at HQ and does his job.

"And what does the pilot  _flambé_ think of your brood?" Olivier's smile is wicked. Her lack of fondness for Mustang has been made abundantly clear, on several occasions, and is a common topic of conversation when either she or Mustang are drunk. No one is entirely sure where the animosity came from, although there are several fairly good guesses. Riza's best guess is that, at some point or other, Mustang made a pass at her, to which, being a very open lesbian, Olivier took some offense at. When asked, Olivier will always say that she doesn't appreciate Mustang's cheeky disposition and his lack of respect for authority, which Riza believes to be true. Mustang will say that he doesn't appreciate the stick up Olivier's distressingly pert ass, which Riza also believes to be true. Either way, their personalities don't mesh well.

Riza swills her own drink thoughtfully around her glass. She's a fan of Drachman Mules, both because of their simplicity and the little copper mug that they come in. "It doesn't matter what Mustang thinks."

"Good answer," Olivier responds, as Riza lets out a yawn. Olivier--who, for as long as Riza has ever known her, has always carried around a pocket watch--checks the time before draining the rest of her drink in one graceful gulp. "I hadn't realized it'd gotten so late. Do you want to crash at my place?"

Riza shakes her head. "No, I should probably head back so the kids don't worry."

"You're already such a mother hen. It's disgusting."

"We can't all be bitter lesbians," Riza responds, downing the rest of her drink as well. "I can make it back to my place. It's only about a half hour walk. And besides, if anyone gives me any trouble, I've got a gun."

"I'd be more worried for them than you, honestly," says Olivier, and Riza can't help but flush with a bit of pride (or is that the vodka) at the compliment. Before joining the Program, Olivier was a world-renowned fencing champion, and Riza knows for a fact that she still keeps a few rapiers in her apartment in case of burglary. Olivier doesn't like guns; she says they lack finesse and the sort of training required of a sword. Riza has fought her on this on several different occasions, but they've never come to an agreement. Riza likes guns, as much as you can like anything that has that sort of killing potential. She assumes that Mustang feels the same about the Flame Alchemist, but they don't talk about it.

They part with little fanfare outside the bar and head their separate ways. This night, like every night in Amestris now, is warm and sticky. After the homunculus Greed melted the Drachman ice caps, the sea flooded all of the coasts, drawing more and more people inland. But, along with that, the steady seasons that Central saw have segued into one long, sultry summer, occasionally punctuated with bouts of rain or, if they're lucky, a day that requires a sweater. After a few minutes of walking, Riza discards her jacket and drapes it over her arm. Jackets always feel necessary when she leaves her apartment at night, but they very rarely are.

Riza and Olivier initially bonded over their alcohol tolerance, being the only two Program women sober enough to take care of a retching Rebecca on a night out that the crew had taken several years ago. It's the sort of thing that Riza takes an offhand pride in, but doesn't think about often. She thinks she must either be losing her edge or had simply lost track of how many drinks they had ordered, because she finds herself, while still steady on her feet, a bit light in the head, such that, when she finds herself in front of Mustang's apartment building, she stops.

She's not sure how long she stands there, staring up at the forty-seventh floor (or what she guesses to be the forty-seventh floor), but it's long enough for her feet to start to ache in their shoes. She's never been one for high heels, but the boots she's wearing are the ones she's been in all day, and she longs to kick them off and prop her feet up. A long bath sounds nice, but her apartment suddenly feels very far away. She checks her phone. In all likelihood, the Elrics would already be asleep, and wouldn't notice if she came home or not. Maybe she could just crash on Mustang's couch. Lord knows it wouldn't be the first time.

She has a key card to get into his building. Hell, she's had a key card since he moved into the building, before they ever set up their strange car pooling system. The ride up the elevator to the forty-seventh floor, despite being as sleek and fast as she supposes an elevator could be, is a long one, and she takes a moment to lean against the wall and survey herself in the mirrored ceiling. She doesn't look  _that_ drunk, and she isn't, which makes her wonder all the more why she's doing this. She could almost certainly make it back to her apartment in one piece, and yet she doesn't want to. Maybe it's all the jabs about her being a mother, or the stress of having managed successfully to recruit Edward Elric to the Program and get around all the bureaucratic hell of allowing his brother and Winry to stay on the military's _cenz_ , but she feels old, and she doesn't want to. She's only twenty-seven, but her joints ache, and she's got a gun on her thigh, and she's tired and--(the door to Mustang's floor opens before the word  _lonely_ has the chance to cross her mind)

She decides this, standing at Mustang's door: if he doesn't answer when she knocks, she'll turn back. And so she knocks experimentally on his door, not knowing if she wants him to answer or not. She isn't given much time to deliberate, as the door opens almost immediately. Aside from looking confused, he looks to be in significantly better shape than he was on the morning that Edward Elric showed up. His hair is in its usual state of disarray, but no worse, and along with his boxers, Mustang is actually wearing a shirt.

"Captain? What are you doing here?"

"Can I come in?"

He shrugs and lets her slide past. There's a cigarette still smoldering in the ashtray of his coffee table, as well as three empty beer cans and several stacks of papers. Riza doesn't take the time to inspect them, instead flopping down with a satisfying lack of ceremony on his lumpy couch, flinging an arm over her eyes to shield them from the humming fluorescence of his cheap floor lamp. 

"Are you drunk?" he asks.

"A little."

"Rebecca?" 

"Olivier," she corrects.

He lets out a small snort of a laugh. "How is the ice bitch?"

Riza cracks a grin. "She's good. She asked about you."

"Well isn't that sweet of her." He perches on the arm of the couch by her feet. "Are you sleeping here tonight?"

"If you don't mind."

"Won't your children worry?" She swats playfully at his leg with her foot.

"First of all, they're not children--Ed's fifteen--and second of all, they're not  _mine_."

"Oh, so he's 'Ed' now?" She can practically feel his smirk.

"Shut up and let me get some sleep."

It must be the vodka, because her laugh sounds unusually rich and husky as it rattles around in her chest. "What are you doing up, anyway? You're a pilot, it should be past your bedtime." Knox and Marcoh, the two physicians who work for the Program, try to go to very great lengths to keep the pilots in peak physical and mental health. For all intents and purposes, Mustang could be a PSA for exactly what you  _shouldn't_ do as a pilot: heavy drinking, smoking, irregular sleep patterns. At this point, it's amazing that he can pilot his Alchemist at all. At least since Ed's still so young, he shouldn't have picked up any of those bad habits.

"I was doing some work," he says, and she still has her arm over her eyes (damn that stupid floor lamp), but she can tell that the smirk has faded, and it concerns her.

It's never been her job to provide levity to a situation, but in her current state she finds it hard not to. She removes her arm so as to better look at his face. "You? Roy Mustang is doing work of his own volition? At two in the morning?"

"If I don't do it during the day, when else am I supposed to do it?" The actual office work required of the pilots is minimal, but even then, Mustang is renowned through the Program for his laziness and procrastination. He doesn't know this, but for the last six months, Riza has been giving him deadlines that were actually two days sooner than they were supposed to be, in the hopes that his work gets in at least somewhat closer to on time. Mustang fixates, she knows that, and has the tendency to obsess over things, but very rarely over anything that he actually needs to do. Something in her gut tells her this isn't right--whatever Mustang would need to submit that week doesn't match with the sheer number of files, papers, and packets on his coffee table--but her inquisitive instinct is tempered by the Drachman Mules, and she can already feel herself dozing off.  _Maybe it was a good idea that I stopped here after all_. 

"Whatever you say," she says with a yawn.

"Wow, you're even meaner when you're drunk."

"You know that. Who would I be if I were nice to you?"

He doesn't answer that question. She doesn't expect him to.

"Do you mind if I keep working while you sleep?"

"Nope," she says with another yawn, stretching her arms over her head. "Go ahead."

Her eyes drift shut, but she can hear him grab a stack of papers off of the coffee table and move to a rickety chair on the other side of the living room. From there she hears him tap on a box of cigarettes, and then the click of a lighter. She doesn't know how many times she's told him to stop smoking, but it reached such a number that she simply stopped wasting her breath. At this point, the smell of tobacco has just incorporated itself into her mental image of Mustang, along with the stupidly expensive shampoo he buys and the strange, alkaline tang of PSL that always seems to cling to pilots, no matter how often they bathe.

Lying on the couch, smelling Mustang's cigarette smoke and hearing him turn pages and occasionally underline or circle things, it almost feels like time hasn't moved in a decade. She could still be sixteen, having fallen asleep by the fire in her father's living room on a chilly night in the long winter after Mustang had revealed to her the nasty secrets of her father's research and her mother's death. Up in the mountains, where the Hawkeye family had lived, they still got winters, which was a luxury that Riza had no idea she would ever have cause to miss. They had stayed up many nights after that, Mustang gradually sneaking out larger and larger files from her father's study. He always shared them with her, which at the time seemed quite noble, but which now seems somewhat stupid. She could have ratted him out at any point, and he had to have known that. But--cracking an eyelid to peer at him in his chair, with a worried crease between his two dark brows and a cigarette between his teeth--she never did. She isn't sure why she didn't, really. At the time, he had been in her home for six months and they had hardly interacted at all. She wasn't used to people her own age, let alone boys, and she was slightly skittish around him, like a dog who had been for too long in the pound. Not that he gave her any reason to be. At eighteen, Roy Mustang was hardly an imposing figure: tall and somewhat gangly, not quite grown into his limbs yet, with a mop of black hair and eyes too serious for his young face. He always complimented her cooking, even though she couldn't cook then and still can't now. He would pick her up candy or ice cream while he was out, which Riza hardly ever ate (she's never been a fan of sweets), but which she always found to be a nice, if slightly confusing, gesture.

Perhaps that was it, she thinks. From years of being an afterthought in her parents' minds, a hindrance in the face of their research, a small, blonde, corporeal tie to a realm they didn't care about, to being a ghost of her mother that terrified her father too much for him to speak to her, it was nice to have someone concerned with her well-being. After so long of being left alone, she supposes that she was a bit starved for attention. Maybe it had nothing to do with Mustang at all, and everything to do with that. 

He catches her eye as he taps ash into one of his living room's many ashtrays, and her eye snaps shut again.  _No,_ she thinks.  _It has everything to do with him_.

"Wake me up in a couple hours, okay? I need to get back to my apartment in time to get ready in the morning."

"Will do," he says, and she can't tell if he's still looking at her or not. This thought unnerves her, and suddenly she doesn't know where to put her arms. She wraps them around her chest.

* * *

He doesn't wake her up. She wakes up several hours later (she isn't sure how many) to the sound of a door closing. All the lights have been turned off in the living room, and the papers have been cleared from the coffee table to protect from any potentially prying eyes.  _The one time he cleans up_ , she thinks,  _I actually wanted to see what his mess was for_. There is still a cigarette butt sending off delicate wisps of smoke in the ash tray by his chair, so he couldn't have been gone long. But there is a small, scratchy afghan draped over her and a glass of water on the coffee table, and that gesture makes something tighten in her belly that she has to actively ignore.

She isn't hungover, thankfully, but she is tired. She pulls her phone out of her satchel, which she had set on the floor in front of the couch, and checks the time. It's slightly over half past five, and she sighs. She had wanted to get home earlier than this, but now it can't be helped. She isn't hungover, but she can still taste bad decisions (albeit minor ones) in the back of her throat. With some reluctance, she shrugs off the afghan and gulps down the glass of water greedily. Pulling on her jacket and her boots, she takes one last look around the apartment and sighs again, knowing that she smells like cigarette smoke and booze. She briefly considers using Mustang's shower before she leaves, but thinks better of it, and sets out, closing the front door as softly as possible. If Mustang finally made it to bed, she doesn't want to disturb him. He needs all the sleep he can get.

From Mustang's apartment to her own is only about a twenty minute walk, but all of Riza's limbs feel heavy and stiff from lack of sleep. Sleeping on the couch hadn't bothered her, though. Her apartment only has two bedrooms, one of which the Elrics share, and the other she had given to Winry until she could figure out a better arrangement. The Elrics didn't mind sharing a bed, but she didn't know Winry well enough at that point, and didn't want to make the girl uncomfortable, so she had been sleeping on the couch since they had arrived.

At least, this early in the morning, it has cooled down a bit. She can even wear her jacket comfortably, which is a welcome relief. Early mornings in Central are popular times to jog, because of the brief reprieve from the heat, but she passes no joggers this morning, and for that she's grateful. She doubts that she looks her best, and thinks that she probably looks like she's straggling back from a one night stand. She wishes, for once, that it were that simple.

When she reaches her building's elevator, she shucks off her shoes, her feet sore from the walk over and slumps against the wall.  _One day_ , she chides herself,  _you're going to have to stop doing this._ She doesn't explain to herself what "this" is, which is good, because she doesn't think she'd be able to.

She tries to get into her apartment as quietly as possible (although she knows, by now, that both Winry and Ed sleep like rocks), so that she can slip silently into the bathroom and shower and, if she's lucky, catch an hour or so of sleep. But wishing is for children, she reminds herself, when she walks into the kitchen and finds that she is not alone.

"Alphonse? What are you doing up?" It can't even be six yet, and Al doesn't have to be at school until almost nine. It doesn't make sense for him to be up this early.

He is sitting at the small kitchen table, Black Hayate asleep in his lap, content to be petted.

"I couldn't sleep," he says, with none of the somberness that Mustang has when he says the same thing.

"Oh," Riza says standing dumbly beside the table. Then he knows that she never came home the night before. She feels oddly embarrassed by this. She knows she isn't their mother, but she is an authority figure, and authority figures shouldn't stumble back home in the wee hours of morning stinking of vodka and cigarettes and strange men's couches.

"I haven't been able to sleep much since Gluttony destroyed our house," he continues, and Riza marvels at his openness to her. She is, after all, for all intents and purposes, a stranger.

With the weak, milky sunlight filtering in through the kitchen's small window, and the bleariness of Riza's eyes from lack of sleep, he looks a bit like she must have looked in that four year stretch after her mother was killed. They have the same short, blonde hair, the same large, brown eyes, his a more tempered gold than his brother's. He's up because he couldn't sleep for thinking of how a homunculus killed him mother, petting Black Hayate. The effect is a little eerie, but Riza finds herself a little mesmerized by it.

"Did anyone at the Program tell you why I work there?" Riza has never been known as an open book (a fact she is often reminded of by Rebecca and Mustang), and so she is surprised when that question falls past the barrier of her lips.

Alphonse's eyes, while wide and guileless, are tired as he shakes his head.

She walks cautiously over to the table and pulls out a chair. "My parents were researchers with the military, and their research sent them into the arctic sea north of Drachma. I went with them. While they were there, the first documented homunculus, Greed, sank our ship and killed everyone on board except for me and my father." Alphonse's hand stills on Black Hayate's back. "After my father died, he gave his research to me, and I decided to use it to try and make sure no one else had to lose what my family did." It's not the whole truth, but it's enough, and Alphonse is looking at her as she must have been looking at him when she came in: like he was seeing himself in a place he hadn't expected. She looks down at her hands, folded awkwardly in her lap. "I'm sorry I didn't work fast enough to help your family."

"Do you want some tea?" Alphonse asks suddenly, and Riza thinks that, despite being being so young, Alphonse is actually much wiser than any fourteen-year-old has a right to be. "I don't think I'll be able to get back to sleep." His smile is bright, despite the dim kitchen and the even darker subject of their conversation. Riza is amazed by this.

"I would love some, actually."

They drink their tea in companionable silence, occasionally broken by fragments of memory, like faded photographs being passed across the table. Stories of growing up in Resembool. Fighting over which brother would get to marry Winry. Ed graduating high school at twelve. Al seems perfectly content to share these memories, pleasantly sepia-toned with time, and doesn't ask Riza to reciprocate, which she appreciates more than he could possibly know. There aren't many parts of Riza's life she deems worth sharing, and so she sits, palms drinking in the warmth of her tea through the mug.

A little over an hour after Riza arrived back at the apartment, Ed stumbles out of the bedroom he shares with Alphonse, hair a blond rat's nest and eyes bleary.

"Alphonse?" He croaks running a hand through his hair.

Alphonse smiles, a bit tired, but otherwise no different than any of his other smiles. "Good morning, brother."

"Couldn't sleep again?" Ed guesses, and Alphonse nods.

"But Miss Riza was nice enough to sit up with me so I wasn't by myself." Having the full force of Alphonse's smile on her is a bit overwhelming, but not unpleasant.

"Just 'Riza' is fine," she demurs. 

Ed looks at her somewhat warily. He looks at everyone in the Program that way, like he isn't quite sure if he can trust them, and she doesn't blame him for that. After all, it was the Program's lack of control over the Gluttony situation that resulted in the loss of their mother, Ed's arm and leg, and their family home. She wouldn't trust them either if she was in their situation. (She supposes her situation isn't all that different, but she has no choice but to trust them.) Along with his apparent caution is another look, a bit of confusion as to why Riza would have been awake in the middle of night too, but he doesn't say anything. Instead, he turns to his brother. "You need to go get ready for school, Al."

"Ay, ay, sir!" Alphonse practically chirps, pulling his chair briskly away from the table.

"Oh, shut up," Ed scowls, but there's no venom in it.

After Alphonse has retreated to the guest bathroom, Riza takes that as her cue to get ready for work as well. She still smells like Mustang's apartment, and while it isn't an unpleasant smell, she still feels hot and sticky from her walk there and back. (That and PSL clings to your nose like formaldehyde. She can even smell it on Ed now, as he's fiddling with the coffee maker.) She pushes her chair gingerly back from the table, the exhaustion suddenly descending over her like a blanket. _That's what you get for a moment of weakness_. It'll be her just punishment, trying not to fall asleep at the console and enduring Mustang's smug looks.

She begins to walk toward her bathroom--an en suite to her bedroom or, she supposes, Winry's bedroom now, as the case may be--when Edward stops her, flicking on the coffee maker and leaning against the small counter. All the casual sleepiness from when he came into the kitchen is gone, and suddenly he's all business, the kid that graduated from a university at fifteen, who achieved a synch rate of 47.3% on his first test, who lost his arm and leg to save his younger brother. He's not to be trifled with just because of his stature or age.

"Thank you," he says, unusually grave for the hot-headed, irreverent Edward Elric. "For sitting up with Alphonse. He doesn't show it, but he gets really lonely, staying up like that. It can't be easy, having nightmares."

"No," Riza says, placing a hand on the doorframe. "It can't."

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Edit: the title of this chapter has changed because I was never really happy with the other one. A Möbius strip is a theoretical mathematical object comprised of two surfaces that never quite touch, but when given a twist in the middle function as a single surface. Möbius strips are symbolic of infinity, and in particular infinite repetition.
> 
> Also, the drink that Riza is drinking is essentially the same as a Moscow Mule (vodka, ginger beer, and lime), but since there is no Russia in FMA (and hence, no Moscow), it didn't make sense to call it that.


	4. "Let's get the stars to align..."

Riza has not slept enough to deal with their bickering this morning.

"I didn't know they made plug suits small enough to fit a shrimp like you."

"Oh really? I didn't know they made plug suits big enough to fit your  _massive fucking ego_."

It's the same tête-à-tête every morning, and usually it's almost funny. Mustang holds no enmity toward the kid, but Edward has misconstrued his jabs as a call to war. That coupled with Mustang's cockiness has resulted in Edward constantly having raised hackles in his presence. At Central HQ they can generally avoid each other, but in the car every morning, they're in close quarters and there's nothing they can do but spar.

Normally, Riza is content to sit in the driver's seat and listen as the two argue over nothing, but this morning there's a headache blooming behind her temples from her lack of sleep, and the overly-hot shower she had taken that morning hadn't cleared her mind the way she expected it to, instead leaving her feeling slightly queasy. At least with Mustang snapping at Edward in the backseat he can't make fun of her for stumbling into his apartment the night before. She hadn't done that in years.

 _You make it sound so obscene_ , she thinks to herself.  _All you did was sleep on his couch._ But for them that _was_ obscene. Their relationship is a collection of clever silences, commonplaces that don't need to be reiterated in speech. So blatantly seeking comfort like that felt wrong. Frankly, the whole thing was a little embarrassing.

"Plug suits fit  _everyone_ , regardless of size. That's kind of the point," Riza snaps. The outburst surprises both pilots enough to stun them into a brief silence. Her patience is wearing thin, and she wonders about the likelihood of being able to sneak off for a nap in the break room. She isn't supposed to be like this. She's a rock. That's her trademark. Mustang jokingly referred to her as the Program's queen (why her and not Olivier, who has a higher rank and the snappy nickname of "Ice Queen" she doesn't know), and though she knows he's kidding, she's taken the quip to heart. Monarchs are supposed to be stalwart, tranquil, unflappable and logical. She doesn't feel like that. 

Riza has had one hangover in her life, and it isn't a memory she likes reflecting on. This isn't that by any means, but her foundations are unsettled and she feels a little tender. After a night of feeling unpleasantly old, she now feels disturbingly young.

The silence doesn't last long before they're back at it again.

"Why do you have Hawkeye drive you everywhere anyway? Isn't she your superior? You should be driving  _her_ around."

"Are you questioning why I would have a beautiful woman drive me around, Fullmetal?"

Riza needs a nap. And maybe an aspirin. 

"I know you're lazy, but this is bad, even for you." Before Mustang has time to retort, Riza catches Ed's eyes gleaming wickedly from the rearview mirror. "Or could it be that the illustrious pilot of the Flame Alchemist  _can't drive a car?_ "

They're stuck at a red light that Riza desperately wants to reach out the window and shoot down so they can just get to HQ and she can get out of this fucking car and away from Ed and Mustang and their meaningless cockfight, but instead she just pinches the bridge of her nose. He had to bring up  _that_.

Riza is, she knows, one of only a handful of people in the world that has known Mustang long enough to have something to compare his persona to. To most, the Mustang that they see is simply Mustang: cocky, lascivious, cheeky, and lazy, despite being irritatingly competent and startlingly intelligent. And those attributes are true, though they haven't always been. Riza can still remember, though it's been over a decade since she's seen him, the slight young man that Mustang was, frail and awkward and fiercely serious. That is, she thinks, the difference between  _Roy_ and  _Mustang._ They seem almost like distinct entities now. After painstakingly getting to know the boy in her father's home, after warming up to  _Roy_ , the first and last person she ever really opened up to, he was almost systematically replaced with someone new, someone self-assured and confident and flirtatious. This new man has muscles and expensive clothes and fabulous exploits to regale their friends with. He bears little resemblance to the boy Riza knew. _  
_

But, as intense as the dichotomy may seem at times, she knows that both figures exist within the one man. Roy is still there, underneath the slick facade of Mustang. He has never fully shucked his insecurities, and not being able to drive reminds him too much of being the spindly teenager who couldn't beat his teacher's daughter in an arm wrestling match and fell off the room of their house while trying to fix a drain pipe, breaking his left arm.

So, as seems to be his modus operandi, Edward has struck a nerve.

"What'd you say?" Mustang asks, turning around in the passenger seat.

"You can't drive, can you!" Edward's glee at this revelation is palpable. "Oh my god, the big, bad Roy Mustang can't drive a fucking car, this is  _amazing_."

"Shut your mouth, Fullmetal," Mustang snarls through gritted teeth.

From the corner of her eye, Riza can see Mustang's hands tightening into fists.

Edward grips the side of Riza's seat excitedly. "Everybody at HQ thinks he's all suave, but you never told me he was such a  _loser_ \--"

The next moment transpires so quickly that she's not sure Edward has time to notice it. One of Mustang's fists bursts forward, ready, she's certain, to wring Ed's neck, but before he has the chance to make it much further than the cup-holders, Riza's hand darts to her thigh, snake-quick, and grabs her gun, pointing it at the ceiling and making a rather ostentatious show of releasing the safety. As exhausted and perturbed as she may be, Riza would never actually point at gun at anyone unless she had every intention of firing. She doesn't really plan on shooting them, but she does desperately want them to  _shut up_. 

It works.

"Okay, since you apparently can't be trusted to make amicable conversation like adults, we're going to drive the rest of the way to HQ in silence, like children. And then, when we get there, I want you both to  _leave me alone._ " Her headache has bloomed into a flower of pain that now has roots snaking down behind her eyes, and it throbs with her heartbeat. Both men snap back to their seats almost instantaneously. She doesn't bother thanking them for their compliance, instead acknowledging their silence by putting the safety back on and replacing the gun at her thigh. And then, finally, what has to be the longest traffic light in Amestris changes to green, and Riza, who has never been a religious woman, thanks every god she can think of for that.

* * *

"Hey, Fuery," Havoc asks, turning in his swivel chair absently. He's been bored all morning. The Alchemists are all functioning properly, although it has been impossible not to notice that there is only one of the three pilots present at the moment.

Armstrong didn't begrudge them of it. "The young misters Elric and Mustang deserve their sleep as much as anyone! Early rising has been passed down through the Armstrong line for generations!" He punctuated that statement with a booming laugh. "And the lovely Captain Hawkeye deserves to rest, as well. We owe her so much, and she is so busy."

Havoc doesn't hold their tardiness against them either (if they aren't here he has significantly less work to do), but without Mustang and Ed's now-constant arguing and the Captain's wry humor and Spartan work ethic, HQ is significantly quieter, and also much more boring.

"What is it, Havoc?" Fuery always has a way of making himself busy, even when he doesn't need to be. He's still young, only a few years out of university, and is still trying to make a good impression with the brass. For what ends, Havoc isn't sure. He can't imagine Fuery being happy in a higher-up position where he'd have too much on his plate to spend time tinkering with communication systems. The kid's too much of a nerd for a position of authority.

"Have you noticed that the happy family is notably absent?"

"'The happy family'?" Fuery asks, eyes magnified by his glasses to an almost frightening level of innocence. 

"The Captain, Mustang, and Elric," Havoc elaborates. No one in this damn HQ appreciates his knack for epithets except for the Captain and Olivier. The Captain isn't here, and Olivier scares the shit out of him, so he has no intention of bothering her.

"Oh, yeah," Fuery says, sliding his headset down onto his neck. "Armstrong is probably right; they probably just overslept. Happens to everyone."

He can't imagine the Captain sleeping. Hell, the woman's last name is  _Hawkeye_. He imagines her constantly perched somewhere with one of her many firearms, keeping watch over her new roost. He keeps that thought to himself. But certainly, the Captain isn't one to oversleep. Mustang? Sure. They've straggled in late before, the Captain quite literally dragging Mustang in by the ear like a naughty child, but they've always had notice beforehand. (She always makes Mustang call in and explain why they are going to be late, both because Hawkeye hates talking on the phone and because she wants Mustang to be embarrassed by his transgression enough to not repeat it. He does anyway. That man has no shame. Havoc knows this for certain.)

Havoc drags on his cigarette contemplatively. "Yeah, I dunno. This is weird."

"You don't think they're late because they slept together, do you?"

Havoc splutters so hard around his cigarette that it falls useless to the floor and he doesn't have the strength of mind to stomp it out. " _Fuery._ " Before Elric signed on with the Program, Fuery was always mentioned under the shorthand of "the kid." Now that he was no longer the youngest on the roster, he was just "Fuery," but he still held the aura of youth and naïveté in a way the rest of them didn't, so hearing him talk about  _that_ was distinctly unnerving.

"What?" Fuery asks, a flush spreading across his baby face. "You know you were thinking it too!"

"Yeah, but we don't  _talk_ about it." Havoc had had a gun raised in his general vicinity one too many times for making similarly conjecturing comments about the status of the Captain and Mustang's relationship, and so he often overstated how platonic and professional they were with each other, just to be safe. Which isn't to say that their relationship  _isn't_ platonic and professional, but there's always been something about them that seemed strange. He knows that they've known each other since they were kids, but neither of them are particularly keen to talk about their past, and so he doesn't know much more than that.

As if the cosmos were punishing him for gossiping about his superior, the automatic door to the observation deck slides open with a metallic  _swoosh_. There, standing in the elevator, is "the happy family," looking not very happy at all. The Captain is in front, eyes steely, with Elric and Mustang behind her, looking like two puppies who got caught pissing on the rug.

"Oh shit," Havoc grimaces under his breath. He's only seen Hawkeye on the warpath a few times, but it's never enjoyable to watch. It is a sight though, like watching a tornado, something entirely out of your control and incredibly dangerous. Terrifying, but weirdly beautiful.

The Captain stalks out of the elevator, with Elric and Mustang following a few respectful (and perhaps cautious) paces behind. They make it to the row of computers before Hawkeye stops crisply, all military formality, in the middle of the floor. She doesn't turn to look at them, instead saying "Go put on your plug suits" with all the threatening quietude of the first rumble of a storm. As Mustang and Elric disappear to the locker room, the Captain takes her usual place to Fuery's left, crossing her arms over her chest.

Without gracing him with a glance, Hawkeye says, icily, "Pick up your cigarette, Havoc."

"Yes, ma'am," Havoc says quickly, scooping up the cigarette butt off the floor and grinding it into his ashtray with more force than ultimately necessary. Hawkeye doesn't acknowledge that the task has been completed, but she doesn't have to.

Havoc exchanges a few worried looks with Fuery, but neither says a word.

* * *

With his grades, Alphonse Elric had his choice of every high school in Central City. While Ed got credit for being the family genius, Alphonse is no slouch. Theoretically, he could've graduated high school and gone on to university by now, but he doesn't want to. The difference between his intelligence and his brother's is one of focus: Ed is single-minded in everything he does, often to the point of being distracted from other things, like eating, or leaving his room. His life had been absolutely consumed with chemistry from the time they were kids, and so it only seemed natural that he would've gone on ahead and graduated from university at this point. Alphonse, however, isn't interested in one thing; he's interested in  _everything,_ and with that kind of lust for knowledge, there's no way he would limit himself to just one field of study. He'd get bored out of his mind, and so his academic path has been far more traditional.

Ultimately, what his decision came down to was that Garfiel's was going to be attended by Winry. While, ostensibly, the school is known for its engineering program, Alphonse is just as interested in engineering as he is in everything else, and thinks that he'd be just as happy studying that as whatever else he could be offered.

It's amazing how quickly one can adapt to a new environment. They've been in Central for just a little over a week now, and Alphonse's life has already segued into a new kind of routine. Instead of walking in the morning to school, like he used to do back in Resembool, now he and Winry take the subway into the Central City center. The first time Al and Winry were on the Central subway (known to the locals as "the Tunnel"), they were so absorbed with sitting on the seats on their knees, peering out the windows at the occasional flashes of tunnel or light or wires, that they didn't notice the looks of annoyance from their fellow passengers.

Al loves Resembool, and knows that he always will. In his heart, when he thinks of the word "home" he can still see his family's house up on the hill, sandwiched perfectly between green grass and blue sky. But a lesson Al learned without ever really meaning to is that home isn't a place. It can be, but it is always the people at that place that make it a home. And so when Ed told him that he was going to have to move out to Central to pilot the Alchemist, he didn't think twice about coming along. 

Upon hearing that her two oldest friends were moving out to the city, Winry decided (much more begrudgingly, and with no small amount of guilt) to come too. The homunculus that destroyed Ishval aroused no small amount of civil unrest among the now nearly decimated Ishvalan population. The Ishvalans were a peaceful people who largely kept to themselves, and as they lived in the middle of a desert, they rarely came into contact with other countries. But while this proved advantageous to them most of the time, it also meant they had no technology that could help them in facing something like a homunculus, and so were forced to rely on the help of the Amestrian military. But the difficulty of defeating Gluttony coupled with Kimblee going on a rampage resulted in the Ishvalans losing much of their trust in Amestris. In some attempt to make amends, Amestris sent out doctors to treat the wounded Ishvalans, including Winry's parents, but they were killed by an angry local.

Mere weeks before, the Elrics were orphaned by the Amestrian military's incompetency, and now Winry found herself in the same situation. Although they had spent their childhoods together, a bond like this was not one that was easily broken. And although Winry did have her grandmother, Pinako, the Elrics were her family too, and she wasn't about to let them leave. (And besides, Pinako was the one who had fitted Ed with automail limbs; if they were to break in Central, who else was going to take care of them but a Rockbell?)

And while Central City may have the people that made Resembool home, the two places could not be more different. While Resembool itself was quite small, the sky always felt huge and vast. There was only one school to speak of and, in general, the days of the town's people passed harmoniously. The homunculus attack is probably the only major tragedy that Resembool ever faced. Central, however, is a massive city, but the sky feels very small. You can only ever glimpse much of it from the outskirts of town, which, thankfully, is where Al lives with Riza. There the number of skyscrapers dwindles, but even then, the light pollution makes it so that seeing any stars is a cause for celebration. Everything about Central is just so  _much_ , so many people, so many buildings, so many cars and shops and schools. Everything is slick and new and tightly compact, everything jostling against everything else, and it produces a friction that always leaves an electric finish to the air.

Something is always  _happening_ in Central, and right now, what is happening is lunch. Al's phone was buzzing in his bag all during class, but he refused to check it, both out of respect for his teacher, and also because the Introduction to Aeronautics course he had enrolled in turned out to be  _fascinating_ , and he was sure that whatever stupid SnapChats that Ed was sending him could wait until he at least got to lunch. _  
_

He's mostly right. There are a bevy of selfies from the locker room, complete with Ed in his plug suit looking even more churlish than usual, although perhaps also a little guilty. From what Al can string together, Ed and Mustang got into a fight in the car on the way to HQ, and now Riza is mad at the both of them and Ed is too scared to leave the locker room. (As photographic evidence of just how much they have fucked up, Ed manages to sneak a picture of Mustang, slumped on a bench in his plug suit, head in his hands. The normally pompous pilot looked defeated.) Al doesn't know Riza well, but he's smart enough to know that you shouldn't get on her bad side if you can help it. That being said, he can't help but laugh at the situation.  _You may be a fancy pilot with a college degree now, but you're still picking fights with people who are bigger than you_.  _Some things never change._

"What are you laughing at?" Winry asks when Al makes it up onto the roof. Being in the middle of the city center, the roof of Garfiel's Engineering Magnet School has a fantastic view of the rest of the city, and on a clear day like this, Al is convinced they can see their apartment building. (They can't.)

"Ed and Mustang got into a fight on the way to HQ this morning and now they're trapped in the locker room because they're too scared to face Riza." 

While Al found this completely hilarious, Winry is exasperated. "What a fantastic impression Ed is making on the Program. He's getting into fights with the seasoned pilots and pissing off the woman who is letting us live with her. I'm gonna  _kill him_ when he gets home tonight."

"If he ever comes back," Al says, sitting next to Winry on the ledge that they use in lieu of a bench. Technically, they aren't supposed to be on the roof, but neither of them have ever been fond of following arbitrary rules. "Who knows, we may have to schedule visits to see him in the men's locker room of the State Alchemist Program."

Winry's glare could melt steel, and Al is thankful that it isn't directed at him (or at Ed; he should be thanking his lucky stars about now that he isn't within Winry's grasp). 

"What an idiot," Winry says, divvying out the lunch that she had made the night before between them.

Al's smile is unwavering. "That's brother."

Al knows that for all the punches Winry has thrown, for all the eye rolls and heavy sighs, Winry loves Edward. And, in particular, she loves him in the most necessary of ways: by not letting her love overpower the fact that everyone can be incredibly stupid at times, and Edward is no exception to that. (In fact, as Winry would claim, Edward is even more predisposed to stupidity than your average person. Al can't argue with her there.)

It's a sunny day in Central, as most days tend to be. At least in Resembool, it seemed that there was always a pleasant, cool breeze blowing through, the kind made for ruffling clothes on lines and pretty girls' hair. Here in Central though, with all the tall buildings and concrete and steel, it sometimes feels like they're living in an oven. Al doesn't hate the heat as much as Ed does (which is his own fault, really; Ed's fashion sense begins and ends with tacky hoodies and jeans, and so he doesn't have much that is suited to the weather), but Winry thrives in it. Al is sure that she misses Resembool as much as he and his brother do--and, unlike them, she actually has family that she's leaving behind--but she looks at home here, balancing the lunchbox on her engineering textbook. Al thinks that if his brother could see her here, he'd be completely done for.

They don't notice immediately. After all, it's not exactly the kind of thing you train yourself to look for, especially not in the middle of this fairly idyllic scene. But, slowly, Al's eyes train on it, and he finds himself unable to look away.

"Hey, Winry?" he asks.

"Yeah?" she asks, taking a long sip from her water bottle.

Al points at the thing on the horizon. "What's that?"

* * *

Personally, there is not a hell Ed could imagine that would be worse than his current situation: stuck in a locker room with Pilot Asshole for the foreseeable future because he had pissed off a woman who could (and possibly would) put a bullet in his head. Of every single person in the world Captain Hawkeye had to carpool with, it just  _had_ to be Roy Mustang.

Ed doesn't know much (or, really, anything) about the Captain and Mustang's relationship. On the car ride to HQ in the mornings, they very rarely talk, although if they tried, he doubts Hawkeye could get a word in edgewise with Ed and Mustang arguing. And although most of Ed's time at the Program so far has been spent in the Alchemist, acclimating and doing tests and simulations, he hasn't failed to notice how they interact outside. Hawkeye and Mustang's interactions are...strange. They constantly seem to be next to or near each other, but they very rarely engage each other directly. If they do, it's usually so Hawkeye can scold him for slacking or generally being a jackass, but there's something strange about it, something Ed can't place his finger on.The only word he can think of is  _affectionate_ , but that isn't the right word. When Winry or Al makes fun of him for being short, or having a tacky sense of taste, that's  _affectionate_. Ed supposes that the way Hawkeye and Mustang interact is  _understanding_ , as if they know each other so well that they don't need to speak. It's unsettling to watch, like some sort of heavily choreographed dance.

As miserable as he is, he can't be as miserable as Mustang. He had to have sat for half an hour on a bench with his head in his hands, and since then has been doing something furiously on his phone, eyebrows knit tight. He hasn't ventured to talk to Ed since they've been stuck in there, which proves just how upset he actually is. Normally they would spat just to pass the time, if nothing else. And this is where Ed gets really confused: this kind of behavior goes way past simply offending your superior.  _It's almost like he pissed off his girlfriend_ , Ed thinks, and then immediately cringes.  _Hawkeye can do_ way  _better than that jerk-off_. 

He's gone from being miserable to simply being bored, at this point. He's running out of things to snap Al (there's no way he would snap any of this to Winry; she'd chew him out for pissing off Hawkeye for sure), and he figured that he'd be busy working and wouldn't have time to read, and hadn't brought anything, and so has started to quiz himself on how many digits of pi he can remember. He reaches the fifty-third digit when the door to the locker room slams open. Ed jumps, worried that perhaps it's Hawkeye, returning to yell at them some more, or perhaps make them go out and do something useful. It isn't. 

Standing in the doorway, blue eyes wide and mustache quivering, is Armstrong. "My fellow pilots," he says, normally booming voice hushed. "There is a homunculus in Central City."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the first of several sets of two-part chapters. I'll talk a bit more about how this is gonna work out in the next chapter, but for now I'll let you languish.
> 
> Chapter title is from "They Want My Soul," by Spoon
> 
> Also tell me that Ed wouldn't be a total SnapChat diva. Honestly.


	5. Mise en abyme I

_Eleven years ago._

Riza wakes from a nightmare, as she usually does, and thinks that she can't remember the last time she had her hair cut. It's an odd and jarring series of events, watching her mother being crushed in her mind to jolting upright in bed and thinking  _My, my hair really has gotten quite long, hasn't it?_ She had always worn her fairly short, or at least what she conceived to be short in comparison to the girls she saw in magazines at the grocery store. When she was younger, it stopped just above her shoulders, but now it's down almost to her hips, and it's beginning to get cumbersome. She wonders why she hadn't gotten it cut in so long, and then the realization hits her like a punch to the gut.

 _Mother always used to cut my hair_.

Berthold was not equipped for cutting his daughter's hair. In fact, Berthold was not equipped to have a daughter most of the time. Aside from being a single-minded and distant man, he finds himself infinitely perplexed by his daughter's  _femaleness_. When they're young, it's easy to think that children are sexless, uniform screaming-wanting-clinging things. But now that she's very nearly a woman, Riza looks startlingly like her mother. Faced with the prospect of bumping into a ghost, Berthold retreated even deeper into both himself and his house.

Riza rises from her bed and moves to her mirror, examining the hair that hangs down her back like a veil. It suddenly feels unbearably heavy. She moves to the kitchen, silent and tranquil as a martyr, still in her pajamas. She's no chef, but after years of being the only cook in their house, Riza knows their small kitchen like the back of her hand, and she doesn't have to guess as to what drawer the kitchen scissors are in. She tucks them into her palm and then returns back up the stairs. 

Their power had been out for almost a week, but the previous night, the lights had come back on. Riza wasn't sure how; her father hadn't published anything or taught in years, so she supposed that her father had finally, begrudgingly accepted money from her grandfather, her mother's father, the man she only knew through a few summers spent in East City when she was younger and her parents were away. This early in the day though, there is still plenty of sunlight coming through the window as Riza reaches her bathroom. 

Her hands are steady as she gathers her hair into a ponytail at the base of her neck. She catches her own eyes in the mirror and marvels at how dull they look. She's read books where things like this happen: girls cut off all their hair and suddenly feel free, liberated, reborn. When four years' worth of Riza's lost time falls to the bathroom floor, she doesn't feel anything. Her head is lighter, but it's because of the sudden lack of dead weight, not because of joy. It's by no means the most professional haircut in the world, and even after a few minutes of tidying it up and even cutting a neat, new fringe it still looks startlingly apparent that she cut it herself. But there is something oddly satisfying in knowing that, while the rest of the world may be working in strange, silent ways that she doesn't understand and has no control over, she at least has this, this pile of hair on the floor and the cool feel of scissor-metal in her palm.

She scoops the hair into the bin as she waits for the shower to warm up. Luckily they have yet to lose water, although, at this point, it wouldn't surprise her if they did.

It's in the shower that she first feels truly different, not looking in the mirror, or even feeling the lightness of her head. It's feeling the water hit the back of her neck, in seeing how little shampoo it takes to get her hair clean, that Riza feels a bit of satisfaction at her own handiwork. It's such a small thing, but it feels nice to flex just a little bit of her agency, like standing after having been sitting down for a long time.

After drying off, she ruffles her new short hair and shrugs on a shirt and a pair of shorts. Though there are still discernibly different seasons up here in the mountains, the summers are just as sweltering as anywhere else in Amestris, and to save money they don't generally turn on the air conditioning, instead opting to leave the windows open and let the mountain breezes keep their house cool. Normally this works fine, and the usually musty Hawkeye house manages to feel airy and light, at least during the day. But today the air is still and stagnant, like there's a storm coming. Riza is immediately thankful that she no longer has the weight of all that hair weighing on her.

She's always awake before her father, so she has at least a couple of hours before she has to worry about making him breakfast. This is good, because right now that sounds like an unreasonable amount of work considering the heat and the fact that the air in the house, even with the open windows, has gone completely stagnant. Sitting at the kitchen table with a glass of iced tea and a book, she feels like she may as well be kept under a bell jar, like something to be studied in a lab.

And then, all at once, it's like the sky breaks open. There is no preamble of thunder, instead arriving impatiently, like an impolite houseguest, all at once. The smell of upturned dirt and wet grass cascades through the windows along with rain, and Riza rushes to seal off all the windows in the lower part of the house. But, even rushing around like this, a bit of the morning's tension has been released. With the cool, moist air and her newly-shorn head, Riza thinks that maybe she understands what all those silly books were saying after all.

It is upon this realization that Riza hears a knock at the door.

They don't get visitors. It isn't that visitors are out of the ordinary, or even uncommon, it's that they don't exist, not for them. In the years since her mother died, since her father shut himself up in his study on the second floor, Riza has been the only member of the Hawkeye family to leave the house, and she's heard the way people in town talk about them. The local kids liked to say that their house was haunted, and dared each other to sneak onto their property. The local girls whispered about her, and the local boys would snicker when she passed. Even with her father fading more and more from reality every day, everyone in town knew of the Hawkeyes. And yet, despite this, they never had any visitors.

Confused and wary, Riza walks over to one of the armchairs in the living room. The end-table is hollow, and inside they keep a lockbox with a small handgun in case of intruders. After Riza's mother died, Berthold often went to quite dramatic lengths to avoid interaction with his daughter. But, in some sudden urge for filial bonding, he taught Riza how to shoot a couple of years ago and gave her the key to the lockbox. She wears it on a chain around her neck always, just in case. If there's one thing that Berthold Hawkeye has taught his daughter, it is that trust is dangerous.

The gun is small, with little ornamentation. It is a gun that has no pretenses of being anything other than what it is. She takes it into her hands and approaches the front door slowly.

She's not sure what she expected to find on the other side of the door, but it isn't what she sees.

Shivering on the doorstep, soaked to the bone, is a boy, probably not much older that her, gripping the handle of a small, wheeled black suitcase. His black hair is plastered to his forehead and, to his credit, his dark eyes only widen a little bit when he sees the gun that is currently being pointed at him.

"Um, is this the home of Berthold Hawkeye?"

Like all good storms, Roy Mustang shows up in the summer.

He doesn't look like much of a threat, but then again, she doubts that she looks particularly threatening either, aside from the gun. She keeps it pointed. "Yes. Who are you?"

"Roy Mustang. I'm Dr. Hawkeye's new research assistant." He releases a hand from the handle of his suitcase and offers it to Riza to shake, but she doesn't move.

"My father doesn't take research assistants."

The boy, Roy, looks confused. "Are you sure this is the right place? I've been corresponding with Dr. Hawkeye for months. He accepted me as a research assistant for a year before I go to university as long as I pay tuition."

"How have you been corresponding?" Riza asks. Her father doesn't own a computer. He didn't trust them, didn't trust the way one power surge could wipe all his files or how one crafty hacker could swipe all of his research. He'd been hand writing his notes since they got back from the arctic. Because of this, all correspondence with Dr. Hawkeye was done through the mail. It was outdated at this point, and inconvenient to boot since they lived so far out of the way. Why anyone, especially a kid, would lie about being her father's research assistant she couldn't know, but this was an easy enough way to check.

"By letter," he says. "Just hang on a second." He flips his suitcase onto its back and begins to unzip it, pulling out a stack of letters bound with string. It looks so antiquated and out of place now, even in the Hawkeye's somewhat old-fashioned estate, that she is taken slightly aback. He takes the letter off the top of the stack and hands it to Riza. "Look. This was the last letter he sent me, the one accepting me as his assistant."

Riza looks at the folded-up letter in Roy's hand and warily lowers her gun, tucking it into the waistband of her shorts at the small of her back. She takes the letter, unfolds it, and sure enough, there it is: her father's unmistakably terrible penmanship, including their address, a starting date, as well as a rate for tuition, room, and board. The letter requested that the money be in before he arrived, which would explain why the lights came back on. After eyeing it sufficiently, she folds it back up and hands it back to Roy.

Their house, being quite old, has no awning to speak of over the front door, and so Roy has been standing in the rain, still shivering, his nice white shirt clinging feebly to his skinny frame while Riza examined his credentials. Satisfied, Riza moves aside in the narrow doorway.

"Come in."

Roy comes into the living room cautiously. "I don't want to get water all over your floor."

Riza shrugs, taking the suitcase from his grip. "I'll clean it up."

"Hey, I can carry that!" he protests, but Riza is already walking in front of him. She considers replacing the gun back into the lockbox, but likes knowing that, walking behind her, Roy can see the handle of the gun sticking out from the waistband of her shorts.

"I've got it," she says, picking it up as they reach the base of the stairs. "According to the letter Father sent you, you'll be staying in the spare room up here." She's never really had much cause to think about it, but Riza thinks now that she's good at following orders, even when they haven't explicitly been given to her. Now she knows that her father wouldn't want to be disturbed just because his assistant has arrived, and would want her to show him to his room. 

No one has stayed in the spare room for as long as Riza can remember, and she wishes that she had been given some notice to be able to fix it up a little before Roy showed up, but there's no point in complaining about that now. 

"So, Dr. Hawkeye never told me he had a daughter," Roy says blithely as they climb the stairs.

Riza says nothing. There's nothing to say to that.

* * *

She leaves Roy in the spare room to unpack and settle and then moves into the kitchen to make her father some breakfast. She supposes it's still breakfast, despite being almost noon, but she knows that he doesn't care about the semantics, and neither, really, does she.

Her father is where he always is, in his second-floor study, curtains closed, still studying by the old oil lamp they kept in the crawl-space in case of storms, as if he hadn't noticed that the power had come back on. (Maybe he hadn't.) It's probably a bit of a fire hazard, since his study is composed of dusty old books and crisp files, all things that would happily catch fire if given any provocation.  _Maybe_ that  _would actually upset him_ , she thinks, with just the smallest hint of bitterness. Of course he would be upset if all his research went up in smoke. He had spent his entire life working on it, whatever it was; it was all he had left of Riza's mother. Or, at least, all he had left of her that he actually wanted to look at.

She sets the tray down gingerly on the edge of his desk.

"Here's your breakfast, father," she says.

"Thank you, Riza," he replies without looking up from his notes. The study, despite the darkness, is unbearably stuffy. Berthold refuses to leave the window open, and with the curtains perpetually closed it feels as if he spends his life trapped in some sort of cave. She's not sure how he stands it.

"Your new research assistant showed up a little while ago," she adds. She asks none of the questions that she wants to ask, like how he had managed to sort this out without her knowing, even though she was the one who always got their mail, or why he would hire a kid as a research assistant, or  _what exactly he was researching in the first place_ , but she doesn't.

Riza is good at taking orders, but she's also good at not asking questions. When she had been allowed to go onto the A.M.S.  _Flamel_ with her parents four years before on the sole condition that she not interfere with their work, she had taken that condition quite seriously. Her childhood, and now her adolescence, was a composite of different kinds of loneliness. As a young girl it was staying with her father's parents in West City or her mother's parents in East City while her parents were off working, seeing them only for the occasional month or two before they inevitably left again. Her time on the  _Flamel_ was the longest she had ever, and would ever, spend with both of her parents at once. And now that her mother was dead, she was left with a big, empty shell of a house and a thin, empty shell of a father. And now he had a new research assistant, meaning that he could theoretically get twice as much work done as he could while alone, and he would retreat even further into himself and even further away from her. 

Her head may now feel light, but her heart feels heavy.

"Ah," he says, taking the cup of coffee from the tray and nothing else. "He said he would be arriving today." He adds nothing else, and Riza doesn't press it. They may be home now, but the condition remains tacitly in the air:  _Just don't interfere with my research_. "Send him in once he's finished unpacking."

Riza nods and begins to move for the door. But, surprisingly, Berthold stops her. "Riza." She stops in her tracks, like a well-trained dog called to heel. "Roy Mustang is a smart boy, and I trust him with my work, but that is all." Riza isn't sure what her father is getting at. "Always keep your eyes open, Riza. Just because someone is smart doesn't mean they aren't capable of horrible things." Riza is well-aware of her father's paranoia and anxiety, and even inherited a little bit of it. She's skittish around strangers, particularly men, but the gun nestled into the small of her back makes her spine stand straighter and she feels brave. And besides, she hardly thinks the spindly, rain-soaked boy who showed up on their doorstep is capable of "horrible things," as her father put it.

"Yes, Father," she says.

"I don't want you interacting with him more than you have to. He's here to work, not to be your friend." His eyes catch hers suddenly, and she is struck by how little they look alike. His eyes are thin and blue, hers round and amber. His blond hair has dulled with age, leaving it the color of dry straw, whereas Riza's is the sweet honey color of her mother's. Everything she has is her mother's. Her memory of the woman is starting to fade, not aided by the fact that, in a drunken rage a few years ago, her father had torn every picture of her out of its frame and burned it in the fireplace. But she remembers her every time she looks in the mirror and sees herself, and every time she looks at her father and sees something that seems so very far away and detached from her.

"You are to call him 'Mr. Mustang,' not 'Roy.' He is here in a purely professional capacity. Is that understood?"

In the flickering lamplight, the shadows under his cheekbones make him look skeletal and sickly, and his small blue eyes look like shards of glass. He doesn't look like her father anymore. 

"Yes, Father," she says, feeling suddenly small, gun weighing heavy at her back.

"You may go now."

She nods and ducks out of the study as quickly as she can, grateful for the open windows in the rest of the second floor. She hadn't realized how difficult it was to breathe in there, and her heart is shuddering in her chest as she leans against the wall, steadying her breath.

Of course Roy-- _Mr. Mustang_ , she corrects herself--chooses that moment to leave his room.

"Are you okay?" he asks, black eyes full of concern that she can't accept.

She straightens immediately. "I'm fine." She pushes her fringe out of her eyes to have something to do with her hands. She can't play with her long hair anymore, for which she's grateful. It was a silly habit, and it made her look younger. But still, her hands itch to have something to fiddle with, and so this is the best she has. "Father wants you to go to his study once you've gotten settled. It's the door at the end of the hallway."

"Thank you," he says, his voice reaching for something. "I never got your name."

Her father's voice rings around in her head, like a song she can't clear from her mind.  _He's here to work, not to be your friend._ She's never had a friend, so she's not sure what it would be like even if he were. "Miss Hawkeye will do fine."

* * *

_Two weeks later._

This is the first summer that Riza truly understands what the rest of Amestris has had to deal with in the last four years. It doesn't matter if she leaves the windows open, or closes the curtains, or wears as little clothing as she can get away with, considering the new addition to the Hawkeye household, it seems that she is always  _sticky_. Now she can almost pretend that cutting her hair had been a practical, rather than an emotional, decision, as even without the curtain of hair that she used to have, the back of her neck feels perpetually like it's been coated in honey, and all of her shirts stick to her skinny back. 

She spends most of her time in the kitchen because, since the warm air rises, her bedroom and the entirety of the second floor feels like a sauna. At least the kitchen has lots of windows that can be opened and the tile floor feels cool against the soles of her feet. She drinks iced tea by the gallon and goes outside only when absolutely necessary. She only owns a couple of dresses, never really being one for dressing up, but she's taken to wearing them to go and do the shopping so that at least she can get a breeze between her thighs if nothing else.

The only consolation has been the storms. Up in the mountains like this, they never got much rain. The air has normally been thin, dry, and cool. But with the rising sea levels, the air has suddenly been saturated with moisture and heat, leading to thunderstorms in numbers that Riza can't ever remember them having. They bring a much-needed reprieve for an hour or two, and come every afternoon like clockwork.

The pretty young pharmacist had joked with her when she had gone to pick up her father's medications that it was like they were living in the tropics now, complete with a rainy season. Riza didn't laugh.

Her mother had been from the east, near the Ishvalan border, where the land went from hilly and green to flat and arid. She had grown up in East City and Riza can remember her telling stories about the summers there. She always told them fondly, but she once mentioned that summers made people stupid. Riza, who had never experienced a proper summer, had no idea what she had meant, but she thinks now that she might understand.

She's managed to keep herself in a mostly-right frame of mind, but she can't say the same for Mr. Mustang.

She hears him fall before she sees it. Their rickety storm drain hadn't been prepared for the onslaught of summer rain they had gotten, and was slowly but surely beginning to fall off the roof. Without telling anyone, or being prompted to fix it, Mr. Mustang had managed to ascertain a ladder and had been hard at work most of the afternoon attempting to return it to a state of stability it hadn't seen for probably fifty years. But Mr. Mustang was a city boy--though the circumstances of his birth are up for discussion, he was definitely raised, at least, in Central City--and not accustomed to handiwork or anything resembling hard labor. Most of his childhood was spent getting fawned over by his sisters (whom he talked about very proudly and at length whenever they were together for any extended period of time) and in and out of Central's many libraries. He's hardly got the build of a handyman, so Riza isn't sure what he thought he was doing.

Hearing a loud thud and a muffled scream, Riza scrambles up from her seat at the kitchen table and swiftly grabs the gun from the lockbox before running out to check what had happened.

Of all the things that Riza had thought she might see on her front lawn, it wasn't Mr. Mustang lying on the ground, clutching his left arm (which was bent at an unnatural angle that made her stomach turn), with a look on his face halfway between a grin and a grimace.

He looks first at her face, then down to her hands, where she holds the gun. "Do you just carry that thing with you everywhere?"

She sighs, and places it in its now-familiar spot in the waistband of her shorts. She's glad she didn't have to do any shopping today, because there's nowhere to stow a gun when you're wearing a dress. "What are you doing?"

"I was trying to fix the storm drain, but I fell."

"I can see that," Riza says drily. She kneels in the grass beside him, knees sinking softly into the dirt. "Can you move your arm?"

Cautiously, Mr. Mustang tries, and then immediately stops, wincing. "I don't think so."

Riza gingerly picks up the arm, examining it despite Mr. Mustang hissing occasionally in pain. After a few moments' cursory investigation, Riza places it gently back onto Mr. Mustang's chest. "I think it's broken."

He groans, but more out of embarrassment than pain. "Seriously? God, this'll be fun to explain to your dad: 'Sorry that I misplaced this file, sir; I was woozy with pain from my  _fucking broken arm_."

Riza isn't used to people cursing. Both of her parents rarely had an outburst of emotion that would warrant curse words. Of course she knows that they exist--she's sheltered, not stupid--but she has very rarely heard them said around her.  _That's because people curse around their friends_ , she thinks.  _And you don't have any friends._

Misinterpreting her look of contemplation for one of offense, he apologizes: "Oh, jeez, sorry. I'm just messing everything up today. First I break my arm, and then I curse like a sailor around my teacher's daughter. Fantastic." He runs his non-broken arm through his hair, mussing it even worse than it already was.

For Riza, there is only one option in this situation, and so she takes her arm and snakes it behind Mr. Mustang's shoulders.

"What are you doing?" he asks, a flush creeping onto his pale cheeks.

"You can't just lie in the dirt. You've got to get to the hospital. Now stand up." Awkwardly, and trying valiantly to not look her in the eye, Mr. Mustang wraps his right arm (the one he hadn't broken trying stupidly to climb onto the roof) around her shoulder, leaning into her side so that she could help him stand.

"And how do you propose we get to the hospital?" he asks, steadying himself before taking his arm from Riza's shoulders.

"I'll drive you."

He squints at her as if studying her from behind foggy glasses. "Yes, because getting arrested is exactly the perfect follow-up to me breaking a bone."

Riza blinks. "What do you mean?"

Riza can practically see the cogs in Mr. Mustang's mind turning before coming to a sudden conclusion. "Wait a second. How old are you?"

"I'm sixteen."

" _No fucking way._ " The withering look Riza gives him is apparently sufficient proof that she isn't lying. "I'm sorry, it's just...you look so  _young_ , what with the short hair and the dressing like a boy and everything." Riza didn't know that her eyes could physically roll that much. "Oh  _god_ , I'm sorry, I just--"

Riza begins walking toward the car. "You can either come with me and get your arm fixed or you can languish on the grass. Your decision."

He immediately begins to sprint after her, clutching his useless arm to his chest. "Right, Miss Hawkeye, sorry!"

Riza doesn't have her license, but she seriously doubts that it matters. She's a good driver, and the desire of most of the townspeople to forget that her family exists is enough incentive for no one to pull her over. She drives with the windows down, relishing in the wind whipping through the choppy layers of her short hair.

"Sorry about the whole 'you dressing like a boy' thing," Mr. Mustang shouts over the sound of the wind.

"Your charm must mean that you have loads of girlfriends back at Central," Riza says crisply, and he doesn't respond to that. 

They drive silently for a few minutes before Mr. Mustang asks "Can I turn on the radio?" Riza shrugs and Mr. Mustang fiddles with the buttons on the console, probably not used to a car as old as theirs. Berthold Hawkeye was old-fashioned and frightened of change in most aspects of his life, and that extended to his car as much as to anything else. They probably had much nicer cars in Central.

"I'm still not used to the stations here," he says as he scrolls through channels aimlessly. "They're different than they are back in Central, and I didn't bring a radio." Eventually he settles on a station with a smile. "But every town, no matter how small, has a Top 40 station."

He settles almost comfortably back into his seat, humming along with the song.

Riza doesn't listen to the radio much. They've always had a radio in the house--in fact, the radio was their only major piece of electronics--but her parents mainly used it to listen to news. She can remember, if she tries very hard, her mother playing the radio a little when she was younger, but she can't remember why or what was playing. It's never been relevant, so she hasn't grown into much of a music lover.

But this is both the happiest and the most comfortable she's seen Mr. Mustang since he showed up two weeks before, which is hilarious. His arm is broken, he should be miserable, but instead his shaggy head is bopping along with the song and an easy smile is playing across his lips. She knows that she just told him a little while ago how old she was, but she realizes that she doesn't know how old  _he_ is. He underestimated her age, but she thinks she may have overestimated his. He's obviously old enough to be living away from home, but sitting and listening to what has to be popular music, he just looks like a kid.

The song segues out without Riza giving it much notice, but the next song comes on and Roy bolts forward in his seat, suppressing a wince at moving too quickly, but turns up the volume anyway, shouting "I love this song!"

Riza is vain. It's not a trait about herself that she thinks about often, and it doesn't manifest in the ways vanity normally does. Her appearance isn't something she thinks about often, at least not in the superfluous sense. She couldn't care less about her hair or her clothes, especially not in this heat, but she is easily embarrassed, and is ill-at-ease around most people. And so once the surprise at the often grave, mostly awkward, Mr. Mustang suddenly belting out a song on the radio fades, she finds herself oddly impressed. With a broken arm and a grass-stained shirt, sitting in the passenger seat of a car next to a girl who had pointed a gun at him mere minutes before, he looks so comfortable with himself. She wishes she could do that. Even if she knew the words, she doubt she'd ever be able to let herself go that much. She begins to tap her index finger against the steering wheel to the beat anyway.

The rest of the ride to the hospital passes in pretty much the same way. Mr. Mustang knows all the songs, but none of them get the same sort of reaction that the last one did. The ride is (Riza realizes with no small amount of chagrin) almost pleasant. She's passed other kids her age out looking much the same as they must have looked, singing along to the radio with the windows down, but she had never been in that situation before. It was almost like they were friends.

Being the middle of the day, they get Mr. Mustang into the emergency room quickly. Waiting on a stiff hospital cot for a doctor to come in and set his arm, Mr. Mustang smiles at her, a bit thinner than before. Perhaps the adrenaline and endorphins are beginning to wear off. She's a bit impressed with his endurance. Most people would've been crying, but Mr. Mustang barely lets on that he's been in pain this whole time.

"Thank you for driving me out here, Miss Hawkeye. I really appreciate it."

It feels like something has changed between them, but she can't put her finger on what. Maybe it's like her mother said, and the heat is just getting to her head and making her stupid, but before she can stop it, she says "Riza."

"Hm?"

"My name is Riza."

The smile fades briefly as Mr. Mustang processes that information, and then comes back even brighter than before. "Then thank you, Riza. You can call me 'Roy,' you know."

Out of the corner of her eye, Riza can see the flutter of a white lab coat. "I think your doctor's here, Mr. Mustang."

She wasn't trying to be funny, but Mr. Mustang laughs anyway: not some little chuckle, either, but a deep guffaw coming from his stomach that bursts out of his mouth with surprising force and volume. She hasn't heard him laugh like that before. She chalks up the sudden heat creeping up the back of her neck to the summer afternoon and the goosebumps crawling up her arms to the chilly hospital air conditioning.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, while this is ostensibly an NGE AU, and remains as such, it has also ended up being kind of a headcanon dump for me. And while I want to further the plot, I also have a lot of backstory that I don't want to go to waste. Because of that, I'm going to do this twofold. For all the two-part chapters, I'm going to put a mise en abyme chapter between them to explore an instance from prior to the story's beginning that you wouldn't get to see otherwise. Also, to keep up the NGE vibes, I am going to have three such two-chapter/mise en abyme sandwiches as an homage to the Rei I/Rei II/Rei III cycle in the anime.
> 
> "Mise en abyme" literally translates to "setting in an abyss." It's a literary technique where you have a mini-narrative within a larger narrative that encapsulates the narrative as a whole.
> 
> Also, considering that Eva takes place in 2015, eleven years prior to the start of this fic would be 2004. While this thought is hilarious enough on its own, I had to track down pop hits from 2004 to figure out what would be playing on the radio, and decided that the first song that comes on is "Confessions Part II" by Usher, and the song that Roy is singing along with after that is "Hey Ya!" by OutKast. You're welcome.


	6. "...for lambs to slaughter."

Riza wasn't aware that a single space could both feel tense and listless, but that is exactly how HQ feels at this moment. Or maybe it's just how she feels. Her initial anger at Ed and Mustang's immaturity (expected for one, completely inexcusable for the other) has faded with the morning and segued into exhaustion. The continuous, rhythmic click of Fuery's keys as he does calculations at his computer and the thick, sultry smell of Havoc's cheap cigarettes lulls her into a kind of trance, making her limbs and eyelids heavy. Combined with the fact that Fuery and Havoc's usual banter is notably absent, Riza finds herself on the edge of sleep.

This doesn't go unnoticed, and she jolts awake at the sound of a ceramic mug meeting her desk. She looks up to see Olivier, standing stately as a statue above her. Her sudden presence visibly alarms Fuery and Havoc, and they do everything in their power to avoid making eye contact with her.

"You looked a little tired, Captain," she says. Her tone could easily be misinterpreted as steely, but Riza knows her well enough to see the layer of mischief underneath. No one aside from Rebecca and Mustang knows that they're drinking buddies, which is perfectly fine with her. It makes everyone's lives a little bit easier if none of the boys knows that Olivier secretly likes to drink cosmopolitans or that, when drunk, Riza has the tendency to forget relational boundaries.

"I was, Colonel, thank you," Riza says, raising the mug greedily to her lips. She had at first been too angry, and then too tired, to make coffee herself, and so she's infinitely grateful for Olivier's own hawkish eyes.

But Riza should know by now that Colonel Olivier Armstrong does very few things for pleasure. "And by the way." She drops the next sentence with a chilling nonchalance, as if letting a live bomb fall onto the carpet as easily as a toy. "General Bradley would like to speak with you."

Riza Hawkeye has spent most of her life negotiating with different kinds of fear. As a child, they were normal child-fears, rooted in a poor understanding of object permanence and an occasionally apocalyptic feeling of anxiety that was already beginning to color how she saw the world: that her parents would never come home from wherever they were, or, even worse, that they didn't want to come home, because they didn't love her. But as she grew older, her fears became at once much larger and much smaller: black monsters rising from the sea and eyes that held onto hers for longer than they should; a country reduced to ashes and turning out to be a failure; a young boy with a power he doesn't understand the implications of and the fear that she may not have as much control over herself as she thinks she does.

But as much as these fears seat themselves in the shadows between the blinds of her bedroom window and in the compulsive cleanliness of her apartment, if there is one thing she finds it very hard to be frightened of, it's General Bradley. She probably should be worried by her summons. After all, while she may be in charge of corralling the pilots, she has a comparatively low rank in their operation. Olivier has always been his right-hand woman, and (to which Olivier occasionally bemoans after a few drinks) serves as his go-between for the General to the lower-ranking officers and technicians. Because of this, Riza and the General don't interact much face-to-face. The last time they had brushed shoulders was when she had petitioned him to recruit Edward Elric. After a brief moment's thought he had consented, but with a odd paternal glint in his one functioning eye that made her stomach twist in reminiscence of childhood, he said "I have high hopes for you, Captain."  His plummy baritone belied an empty smile. "Don't disappoint me."

He hadn't wanted to see her again after Ed blew his first synch rate out of the water, so she figured that she had followed through on that command. 

The General isn't in his usual perch, up on the top observation deck where he can watch over their work like he's actually on a battlefield and not in a mostly-secret underground bunker where they are markedly safer than every other citizen of Central City. (She knows exactly what he would say to that quip, too: "This  _is_ a battlefield, Captain. Just because we aren't fighting another army doesn't mean this isn't a war." She supposes that he would have a point there, but occasionally it feels like all the tax dollars they're pouring into this overgrown science fair project are pointless. They haven't seen a homunculus in nearly four years, and occasionally it feels like they really are just the products of grief and bad dreams after all.) Instead he's in what the members of the Program call, affectionately, the "War Room." The size of the room is slightly absurd, as if it were actually designed to house a war's worth of foreign dignitaries, with a large, ovular table that looks the perfect shape and size for unfurling a map of the world that would then be pocked with flags and tiny model  armies. As far as Riza knows, the War Room has never actually been used for this purpose. Occasionally the General will meet with other military high-ups, but for the most part, the Amestrian military wants nothing to do with the State Alchemist Program. After the destruction of Ishval, they were deemed a failure. Everyone in the Program is working very hard to turn that around, but without any consistent attacks from homunculi ( _thank God_ ), it's a little difficult to do that.

The General is seated at the long end of the huge, oval table, leaned casually back in his chair, elbows on the armrests and his finger steepled in front of his sternum.

Olivier closes the door behind them with an air of finality that isn't lost on Riza. Something isn't right here. But still, she salutes anyway. "General," she says crisply.

"At ease, Captain," says the General, face as placid and unreadable as the surface of a murky pond. He doesn't bother with preamble or pretense for their conversation, which she appreciates. Today is not a day for her to pretend to fawn over pictures of Selim. "I will trust you not to be alarmed at what I am about to say. We need your calm now more than ever."

She had always thought of her cool disposition as more of a passive character trait than as something that could be utilized, but that among other things is what, she supposes, makes her a good soldier. The General didn't haphazardly hire people. "Of course, sir."

Olivier is still standing next to her, as opposed to her normal place next to the General, which Riza thinks is odd. She knows that, despite whatever affection they have for each other as friends and comrades, Olivier's primary loyalty is to the General and to the Program. She is standing at Olivier's right, which is a dangerous place to stand. Never quite getting over her days as a swordfighter, Olivier keeps a knife on her person at all times, harnessed to her left thigh. One swift twitch of her arm muscles and she could fell men twice her size. If Riza doesn't have as tight a lid on herself as she thinks (which, given recent events, she may not) and causes a scene over whatever the General wants to tell her, Olivier is there to do damage control. She swallows thickly, the sour aftertaste of coffee still seated fuzzily on her tongue.

The reason for his wanting to see her slips quietly from between his lips, like a child peeking out from behind their mother's skirts: not quite frightened, but wary. "There's a homunculus in Central City."

She's not sure why, but her first response is to want to laugh. She's never been quick to laughter, even when she was a child, but it sounds like a bad joke. There hasn't been a homunculus  _anywhere_ in four years, and all the ones that there have been have showed up in remote areas: the Drachman sea, the Ishvalan desert. The idea of a homunculus in Central, all huge and strange and otherworldly, like something out of a Xerxean myth, lumbering through the city is laughable. A giggle bubbles in her stomach nauseously, but never makes it past her lips. There is no mirth or affability to the General's one eye now. He looks like what he is; he looks like a general.

"Are you certain?" she asks, too shocked for her voice or knees to start wavering. 

The General nods, but doesn't elaborate on how he knows this for sure, which somehow makes her more nervous. "It's on the outskirts of the city for now, but it won't be for long at the rate it's moving."

"Have you evacuated civilians yet?"

"I brought you here to get your opinion on that matter, Captain," he says. His mouth remains thin, but there's something glinting in his eye that sets Riza in a state of dis-ease.  _Is this a test?_ "As of now we have two options: we can either mobilize the Alchemists now and meet it halfway, or we can evacuate the civilians and wait for it to get to the city center and meet it on our own turf. It's up to you." He says it as casually as suggesting what toppings they could get on a delivery pizza: _Pepperoni or state of emergency, it's up to you._

"Meeting it halfway would be quicker and would likely minimize collateral damage, but we would run the risk of allowing it too far into the city center and injuring civilians," she says, slightly impressed by her own ability to slip back into this frame of mind, despite how long it's been since she's had to. "There's also the fact that the Alchemists can only run for so long once disconnected from their umbilical cables, meaning we'd be on a double time crunch. Evacuating the civilians would take longer, but it would also guarantee that there would be no civilian casualties as long as we get them out quick enough. If we waited for the homunculus to get to us, we could keep the Alchemists connected for longer, maximizing our chances of actually apprehending the it." It's comforting to talk about something she knows how to talk about, and she lets herself to sink into the feeling like a pair of worn, old sweats. She's good at talking about strategy, about war. But there are so, so many things that she isn't good at talking about. She isn't good at talking about (or  _with_ , for that matter) the small brood she has managed to both acquire and avoid in the last week. She isn't good at talking to either Hughes about his family or Rebecca about her continuous and dizzying array of one-night-stands. She isn't good at articulating why she is worried about Mustang. And, most of all, she isn't good at articulating why she is worried about herself. But this, this is as easy for her as talking about the weather, as cleaning her gun. "I would recommend the second course of action, sir."

She's never thought about the General as a man given to theatrics, but she swears that what follows is a dramatic pause. Her breath would be a little more baited if she wasn't absolutely certain that she was right, and that he knew it.

"Alright, Captain. I trust your judgment," he says evenly. His one-eyed gaze shifts to Olivier. "Colonel, put in the necessary orders to have the civilians evacuated from the city."

Olivier nods sharply. "Right away, sir." She's out the door in a flurry of silver and gold. 

"As for you, Captain," he says, returning his one eye to her two. "You need to shelve whatever domestic dispute happened this morning and mobilize our pilots."

She feels an embarrassed heat flooding her cheeks, and she hates herself for it. "Of course, sir."

* * *

Amazingly, despite having seen one before--seen it vividly, seen it crushing his home, crushing his  _mother_ , his _childhood_ , and all manner of other warm, abstract concepts--and having his brother working for the agency that was specifically designed to protect against them, Alphonse never thought that he'd see a homunculus again. And he can't see it, per se. But he may as well be able to with the way that schoolchildren and teachers alike are running around the school, frantically contacting parents and organizing car-pools to get outside of the city center and into the suburbs, checking to see if the Tunnel was still running, or the buses. Everything has slipped into a colorful blur of noise and motion that, for a moment, he doesn't register the teacher gripping him roughly by the shoulders.

"Elric!" the teacher is calling repeatedly. "Alphonse Elric!"

Al comes back into the moment sharply, like jolting out of a dream. "Oh, sorry, what were you asking?" Al is too dazed to be properly frightened.

The teacher releases him and reaches for the clipboard that she had clamped underneath an arm. "I was asking about your family. We're trying to organize where everyone should go for the evacuation. Where does your family live?"

His eyes instinctively begin to scan the mob for Winry. After leaving lunch they had gone back to class, ignoring the strange speck on the horizon, and Al had gone to his algebra lecture. But because Winry is a year ahead of him, they were separated, and didn't expect to see each other again until classes let out for the day.  _But nobody expects to be evacuated because of a giant monster who wants to kill us all._

"Where is Winry Rockbell?"

The woman's eyes behind her frameless spectacles are confused. "Who? This isn't a time to worry about your girlfriend, Alphonse, I'm asking about your family--"

"She isn't my girlfriend!" Al protests, suddenly frantic. "She  _is_ my family!"

The teacher's face registers a startling lack of understanding, perhaps misinterpreting Al's statement for some sort of early adolescent's melodramatic camaraderie. But in Al's mind, the statement wasn't symbolic; it was quite literal. He had grown up with Winry, and she had come to Central to support Ed just like he had. In his mind, that made her just as much family as anyone.

"Alphonse, we need to--" But Alphonse isn't listening. Fear is coursing electrically through him, making his muscles twitch. The only thing he can think of with any coherence is that he  _has to find Winry_ and they can figure out the rest from there. Al ducks away easily from the woman's clumsy arms and is off in a sprint before she can notice exactly what happened. He's a good runner, and he's got long, lean-muscled legs that are good for long distances. In the months following his mother's death and his brother's loss of limbs, Al had tried everything to get himself to fall into a dreamless sleep, and while the running hadn't worked in that respect, he liked it. If he ran himself to exhaustion, to the point where there was nothing else to do but let himself buckle with his shaking knees and aching feet, he could at least feel a bit of relief. He had found a lot of nice hillsides in Resembool that way. 

Being in the middle of the city, Garfiel's is a big school, both in headcount and square footage, but he finds Winry easily, being corralled with the rest of her class by an administrator. It was strange; in all those years that he and Ed and Winry had spent as a triad, growing up and around each other like vines on a trellis, they had developed a kind of six sense for each other. It was as if they could track each other down by sense of smell or echo location. But that still sounded too conscious; the way they found each other was never intentional, it just  _happened_ , young planets slipping in and out of each other's orbits. _  
_

"Winry!" he shouts above the din.

Her eyes catch his immediately, and without having to think or negotiate, she wriggles out from the throng, ignoring the shouting of the administrator trying to usher her to safety.

"Al, there's a homunculus," she says breathlessly. "That means--"

"Ed," they say simultaneously. 

It was strange. The night Winry told Pinako that she was planning on following the Elric brothers to Central, her grandmother hadn't been at all surprised. She had just puffed away at her pipe like she always did, heaving out a smoky sigh.

"I always knew those boys would be trouble," she said, her whisky and smoke abused throat crackling under the weight of the news. "But the world is a lot bigger than Resembool, Winry. I've seen a lot of it, more than you know. But that's the business of the young, girl. And you..." She fixed Winry with her small eyes then, unusually watery. Pinako Rockbell was not a woman known for crying, and true to form, Winry would never see her cry. She would save that for after her granddaughter had left. "You, Winry, are so young."

She had thought she knew what Pinako was trying to tell her at that moment, about opening up her world. But since she's moved to Central, she's found the opposite to be true: her world has narrowed, like a camera coming into focus on a single image. What before had consisted of Resembool and all of its inhabitants, of learning how to make automail and school and her friends and a life she had always known and which, yet, continued to become complex and beautiful and amazing, shrank to just them, just Edward and Alphonse and Winry. She thinks, as she locks eyes with Al, that maybe this is the way things were always supposed to be, and always had been, but she had been too busy to notice.

They don't have to think it over or voice it aloud, because there are no other options, not for them. 

As a precaution, Riza had given them a key-card to get into Central HQ. "Only as an  _absolute_ last resort," she had stressed. "You are not to be there unless there are no other options, am I clear?" She couldn't have been clearer.

And right now, there were no other options. After all, they were supposed to be with their family, and right now their only family was about to fight a monster.

* * *

That morning's exhaustion and confusion have left her. It's hard to imagine that she had been falling asleep at her desk mere minutes before when now adrenaline is burning through her muscles and making her eyes feel bright and alert. Her hair, which she hadn't bothered with and just left down, she now clipped up to keep out of her way. Mustang always liked to joke that this was Hawkeye for "I mean business."

"Your dad always did the same thing," he said with a smirk. Riza knew this was a lie. If her father had ever been aware of how long his hair had gotten in the last few years of his life, he never showed it, and he certainly didn't own something as frivolous as a hair clip.

"Like father, like daughter," she had said anyway, humoring him. She humored him less and less these days.

But, all that aside, she  _does_ mean business, and this is her business. 

"Falman," she says, and he salutes at her sharply.

He doesn't have to ask her why she's there. Falman, as keeper of the SAGE system, serves as a kind of failsafe for any strategic maneuvers. The SAGE is a massive supercomputer, containing millennia worth of philosophical texts concerning war. Despite this, it isn't infallible. If it was, Riza would be out of a job.

"The SAGE system says that there is 70% likelihood that the homunculus will reach the city center in the next hour, Captain." 

"What is the status of the civilian evacuation?"

"The schools in the city center have already dispersed their students to the designated evacuation areas outside the city. The subways are congested, but everything seems to be going as smoothly as could be expected."

Riza allows herself a small bit of relief at the news that at least the schools were empty, meaning that Al and Winry were somewhere safe. Now she only had to worry about the other children in her care.

"What does the system say about allowing the homunculus to reach us here as opposed to meeting it halfway?"

Falman has always been a bit high-strung, but the sudden anxious sheen of sweat on his high forehead doesn't sit well with Riza. "Well?"

He swallows. "According to the system, the probability of a successful sortie with the homunculus on the outskirts of the city was 65%. Sortieing in the city however..." He sighs deeply. "It only has a predicted success rate of 12%."

Riza's stomach drops. She had never put much stock in the SAGE. She inherited her father's distrust of computers in general, and so the idea of a computer that could not only hold that much information, but could claim to both predict the future and critique her choices made her distinctly uncomfortable. But still, having it show such a blatant lack of confidence in her plan doesn't serve to make her particularly excited for this encounter.

She manages to mask her anxiety in annoyance, something she has honed to a fine art over the years. "Good thing you've got me. Your overgrown fax machine doesn't know what it's talking about, Falman."

He laughs, the drawn lines of his face relaxing just a little.  _This is what queens do_ , she thinks.  _They comfort their subjects, even in the face of what could be abject failure._ But it won't be failure, because she doesn't fail. She can't.

She walks away as calmly as she can from the computer, not liking the way that it blinks at her almost incredulously, as if doubting her abilities.  _You're projecting, Riza_ , she thinks, echoing back the distant explanations of her old psychiatrists.  _Computers don't think or feel. You're the one who doubts you, not the machine_. She wonders if her psychiatrists--who were, after all, employed by the military--could have ever anticipated something like the Alchemists. No one can doubt that they feel. Maybe not in the emotional sense, but at least in the physical sense. She knows that all too well.

"Fuery," she calls, descending a level back onto the main observation deck. "I need you to get on the comm with Brosch and Ross. Armstrong, Elric, and Mustang need to be ready to mobilize as soon as possible. Falman says we have an hour at the outside, but I don't like that stupid computer's odds. I want them ready _now_."

"Yes, Captain," he says, adjusting his glasses and pulling on the headphones for the comm system.

"Breda," she barks as she settles into her usual seat. "I want the PSL ready for dispersion. Try to keep the oxygenation rate high; the pilots are going to be rusty and will need all the oxygen they can get." She doesn't have to turn around to see him saluting her. Finally, she turns to her right. "And Havoc, I want you keeping your eyes on all their synch rates. This is Elric's first sortie with a homunculus and Mustang and Armstrong's first since Ishval. If this starts to go south in any way, I need to know immediately. Are we clear?"

Although Havoc's persona--one of womanizing, drinking, smoking, and an occasionally overwhelming lack of respect for authority (what Breda liked to call "bargain brand Mustang" if he was feeling particularly cheeky)--was hardly one to inspire confidence in his abilities, he knows what he's doing, and Riza knows that. She trusts Havoc more than she ever lets on, and part of it is that she knows she has his complete devotion.

He had developed a frankly embarrassing crush on her not long after he had started on with the Program, and--lonely and adrift in a new city as she was--had allowed him one ill-fated date. It had gone nowhere, and she told him as much, but rather than making a vaudeville act like he did out of the lovers that Mustang continuously snuck away from him, Havoc accepted her rejection with an unexpected amount of grace. That made her like him a lot more than his paltry attempts at seduction had, and now she considers him a good friend. She supposes that initial crush may still be under there, buried beneath his stupid haircut and his almost instinctual need to prop his feet up on tables, but he never presses the matter again. She trusts him with her life.

"Like crystal, Captain," he responds, flicking a cigarette to life and settling in to, for once in his life, accomplish something.

All at once, she is hit with a sudden and staggering wave of affection for her subordinates. It seems like such a war-story cliché now, a story about a ragtag group of soldiers making a family. But most clichés are sedimentary manifestations of compounded truth and experience. They're all the family she has, and she'll be damned if she lets them die today. She owes them at least that much.

She reaches for her phone, calling up Rebecca. As always, despite the situation, Rebecca can be counted on to bring a little levity into the conversation. "Helloooooo," she croons into the phone, and Riza rolls her eyes affectionately.

"How are the Alchemists?"

"Ship shape, Captain!" chirps Rebecca. "As you know, we outfitted the Fullmetal Alchemist with a new retractable blade in the right arm, and we're making sure it's good to go before we put it in the loading dock. Flame and Strong Arm are locked and loaded, though."

"Excellent."

"You're doing great, babe," Rebecca says, and for a second Riza thinks that maybe she's talking to Brosch or one of the pilots before it dawns on her that Rebecca is actually talking to her. She isn't used to being called "babe."

"Thanks, Becca," and she means it, her toes squirming a bit in her boots.  _What is it about the possibility of death that makes people so damn earnest?_ She ends the call and sits, waiting, allowing the sounds of her subordinates hard at work to soothe her racing mind. Her consciousness is full of plans A, B, C, and D, as well as various contingency plans and strategies. All she knows and has learned about homunculi and then, unbidden, the occasional flashes of Ishval pulse behind her eyelids. She pushes them from her mind, focusing her eyes heavily on the heads of the Flame and Strong Arm Alchemists as they peek at her from beyond the glass pane separating the loading bay from the observation deck. Normally they look fierce and powerful, the kinds of things that a nation should be able to put their trust in. But now, in the harsh light of day, they look a little ghoulish.

And then there they are, the world's last hope clad in silly skin-tight suits, and yet somehow managing to carry a dignity unusual for any of the three men. Armstrong generally reeks of good breeding, and Mustang has always had a kind of swagger about him, but it's unusual to see Elric so composed, so stable looking. She had half-expected his childhood to rear its crying head when this day inevitably came, but he looks like a man in everything but height, standing next to the other two pilots. Armstrong and Elric are staring off somewhere into the middle distance, perhaps lost in their own thoughts of simulations and strategies, but Mustang is locking eyes with her. Even from so far away, she knows this for sure.

Fuery nods at her, and she takes the microphone from off of his desk. "Alright men, I know that it's been a while for all of us, but we can do this."

"Speak for yourself," Mustang says, his smile set devilishly. Even his quip can't belie the fact that his hands are balling into sharp fists, and shaking softly.

That same dizzy giggle in her stomach from earlier wants to come out again, but now is, possibly, an even worse time than before.  _Is there ever an appropriate time for me to laugh?_ She settles her eyes nondescriptly on Armstrong to keep it from escaping. Alex is a funny guy, but he never means to be, and therein lies the difference. "As that is the case, I want you all to stick to protocol," she continues as if Mustang hadn't spoke, which prompts her laugh to come out of his mouth instead. Riza never liked her laugh, always thinking it was too masculine, but she thinks it fits her new persona well, if she ever had cause to use it. Coming from Mustang though, her gruff, barking laugh sits comfortably in his throat. "I know that's something of a difficult task for you, but please humor me.

"We'll be using the standard formation; the Flame Alchemist will attack the homunculus from a distance until it has reached a point where the Strong Arm Alchemist can engage with it directly."

"What about me?" Ed asks.

"This is your first real sortie, so for now you'll be providing backup to the other two Alchemists."

"Backup?" he asks, sounding affronted. She doesn't know what he wants from her; he didn't want to work here in the first place, and now he's getting offended when he's not on the front line? How does that make any sense?

"Yes, Edward, backup." She decides to cushion the blow just a bit. "We've recently tweaked the Fullmetal Alchemist, as I'm sure you're aware. We don't want to test out the new features in the middle of a fight. So, for the sake of your safety and the Alchemist's, try and keep to the rear as much as possible."

He mumbles something that she can't quite make out over the comm, but it causes Mustang to knock his shoulder and hiss something about "listening when elders are speaking."

"If you children are done fighting," Riza drawls, "we have work to do."

All three pilots salute their captain, and she can't help the cold chill of fear flopping around in her belly like a dying fish. She wishes she saw doubt on their faces, or fear, but all she sees is trust. They would follow her to their deaths, like lambs to slaughter, and would never question it. They wouldn't even have time to blame her.

"Brosch, Ross." The two young technicians salute her. "Ready the pilots in their entry plugs." She feels like the process should take longer, have more fuss, but for all of them now, even Edward, it's old hat, quick and unceremonious. She thinks of all the times that she's seen this same, bizarre dance be performed, with herself conducting the orchestra, and wishes that she felt the same. But no matter how many times she sees it, it never sits well with her. Mustang locks eyes with her again before climbing into his entry plug. Or maybe his eyes never left her in the first place. She doesn't have time to think about this.

One day, Riza thinks, she will get used to seeing him--her oldest and dearest friend, the single person in the world she can still call family in anything like the traditional sense--lowered into a giant robot. Today is not that day. She doesn't blame Maes for breaking things off with Mustang then, although she very rarely does. On top of being a royal pain in everyone's ass, laughably unfaithful, and a mess of neuroses to boot, she can't imagine what this would feel like if she were in love with him. She may have enough doubts to drive any other person mad, but she has no doubt in her mind then that it would kill her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so I fully intended for this chapter and Chapter 4 to cover the whole homunculus fight, but this ended up being a bit of an expo dump, so I'm going to have to put the fight in the next chapter. If I had done the full thing, this chapter would've ended up as a bit of a (to pardon the pun) monster, and I've got an essay to write and exams to revise for, so I'm trying not to bite off more than I can chew here.
> 
> The chapter title is the second half of the line from "They Want My Soul" that was used for Chapter 4's title. The full line is "Let's get the stars to align for lambs to slaughter."


	7. "I hope you all can forgive me."

Riza remembers moving to Central every so often. It was such an odd, dreamlike time, such that if she doesn't remember it often, she could convince herself it never happened at all.

Her father had always been vaguely ill, for as long as she could remember. It was easier to hide that piece of knowledge under the rug of a childhood that she could talk herself into believing was more halcyon that it really was, but after the death of her mother, it was hard to ignore. When asked, he would always say that the arctic hadn't sat well with him, but Riza wasn't stupid. She was always an overly-observant child, and she remembered her father excusing himself occasionally to go and hide his coughs somewhere. But when they returned to the West and  _settled_ , finally, like a pair of exhausted birds, Riza knew that her father's worsening condition wasn't accidental. It would be something she would become much more acquainted with once she joined the military: it was the sight of a man who had lost the will to live. He was hanging on by the slimmest of threads, and as much as she wished this were the case, this thread wasn't Riza. It was his research.

Once that had been completed, it made sense that he died. Riza had been anticipating it, and had become familiar with the peculiar absence that grief left in your life. She wasn't a crier, and made no particular show of mourning, and this made Mr. Mustang clumsy around her. It seemed some days that Mr. Mustang was all feeling, something that made more sense when he told her bits and pieces of his childhood. (He wouldn't tell her the full thing until they were both older, and Riza could legally drink; she wasn't nearly as shocked to find out that he had been raised in a brothel as he would have liked.) She could practically smell the perfume and hairspray wafting out of his memories, almost feel the sticky-lipped kisses of his "sisters" on her own cheeks. It sounded nice, but strange, like hearing a beautiful song in a language you didn't understand.

And so he tried his best to comfort her using all the tactics at his disposal: hugs, chocolate, words of acknowledgment or commiseration, but they all fell flat and awkward at her feet. Riza Hawkeye had always been a sphinx whose riddle he couldn't quite suss out, a girl who--despite the hips and breasts that seemed to have sprouted with the spring flowers--was carved out of stone. Not knowing what else to do, he decided to meet her on her own turf, to try on a bit of the pragmatism and practicality that always sat so regally on her thin shoulders, but which fit him like a pair of too-large shoes. Roy Mustang was no prince by any means, but Chris Mustang was a canny businesswoman, and he was raised in the lap of a particularly bawdy brand of luxury. She made him pull his weight when he was younger, but never any more, and generally the housekeepers and his sisters were more than happy to dote on the pretty little boy with the charming eyes.

They buried Dr. Berthold Hawkeye with as little fuss and ceremony as possible. They didn't bother inviting anyone to the funeral, as Riza assured him that no one would come anyway. In the last five years, Berthold had alienated anyone whom he could have called "friend" or "colleague," which is to say nothing of his actual family. Riza hadn't seen her paternal grandparents in years.

Roy half expected her facade to crack on the day of her father's funeral to reveal a small, quivering girl, full of sadness and pain, but it didn't. He realized on that day that Riza Hawkeye, unlike himself, was not a person of surfaces, layered upon each other like papier mache. If you picked away at her you would only find more Riza, not different versions of herself. There was not a kernel of truth, buried beneath that hard, stoic exterior. She was all truth, quiet and steady, and you only had to wait for it to be revealed to you.

When asked about her father's house, Riza said to sell it. "It's just a house," she said, gold eyes as unreadable as ever.

They spent several days quietly packing everything into boxes that were either to be taken with Riza wherever she was going or donated to charity. Roy talked more than he normally did in order to fill the even more daunting deficit of conversation that Riza left. He told stories, mostly, about his childhood, about Central (which Riza had never been to), and eventually about plans for the future. He asked, surprisingly timid, if he could have the rest of her father's research. Her reply shocked him.

"Of course. What would I do with it?"

Riza would come to shock him a lot in the coming weeks.

After everything was packed, they slept in the empty house for over a week before Roy finally worked up the nerve to tell Riza what he wanted to do. After the death of his wife, Berthold Hawkeye grew a healthy distaste and distrust for the military. Understandably, Roy agreed, but he had always made sure to keep his private plans to himself for fear of being thrown out of the house after already working so hard to get there. He had always assumed it was something he had instilled in his daughter as well, but now there was no point in lying to her, not when she had already trusted him with so much.

"I'm going back to Central next week," he said as they sat in front of a softly crackling fire in the living room. There was no point, necessarily, for there to be a fire, but Roy had felt profoundly useless for the last few days, and needed something to do with his hands. That and Riza's generally pale complexion had looked particularly sallow recently. Perhaps a fire would bring the roses back to her cheeks.

Riza said nothing to this.

"I've already applied to attend Central University, and--" He picked at a hangnail. "I've also applied for the military training program." He wasn't like Riza; he was no still pool of truth, one that, if disturbed, would occasionally yield revelations. He was a tightly constructed dam, and when one crack emerged, suddenly the whole thing flooded out in a torrent, drowning all in its path. With this one admission out, he was powerless to stop the rest. "Your father's research, Riza, about the homunculi...I've been in contact with some higher-ups that my aunt has an in with, and I've found out that they're trying to get something together, a kind of defense team to protect Amestris from another homunculus attack." It went unsaid that it wasn't "Amestris" that was attacked by the homunculus, it was "Amestrians," but he didn't mention that. "With this research, I could help people. I could make sure that what happened to your mother and the researchers on the A.M.S.  _Flamel_ never happens again. But I wanted to tell you first, before I did anything, because you have as much say about this research as I do, and you trusted it to me. I wouldn't want to do something that you think wouldn't sit well with your father's memory." Roy wasn't accustomed to this much honesty, and he could feel his cheeks flaming, so he stared pointedly at the fire, and not at Riza, where she sat, curled in on herself on the couch.

For the second time that night, Riza surprised him. "My father's dead, Roy. He doesn't care about anything anymore."

He wasn't sure what surprised him more, her flippancy, or the fact that this was the first time she'd ever called him by his first name. He had also never pegged her as such a materialist. Up in the mountains, as in the other more rural areas of Amestris, people tended to be more religious. The topic had never come up in conversation, but something about her always seemed so otherworldly, transcendental in a way he couldn't put his finger on, like she had her pulse attuned to something outside the realm of empirical knowledge.

He nodded, finding that, surprisingly, her metaphysics aligned with his. "What about you, then? You were the only person in his will, after all. Technically his research belongs to you."

Roy always spoke quickly, giving himself little time to compose his thoughts and his interlocutors little time to digest what he had said to them. It unnerved him the diligence with which Riza collected her thoughts, as if carefully lining them up on a table in front of her for inventory. When she finally spoke, Roy let out a shaky breath he hadn't been aware had been caught in his chest.

"My father didn't like the military. Then again, he didn't like much, and that included you and me." Roy's grief for his beloved teacher--"beloved" may be a bit strong of a term, but definitely "admired," and perhaps even "idolized"--was still fresh, and so Riza's words stung. He liked to delude himself that there was no reason for anyone to dislike him, and he had been an incredibly devoted student and, he thought, a conscientious houseguest. His dreams were dashed, but he found himself not particularly surprised at the news. "He loved my mother, and he loved his research. When my mother died, half of him went with her, and when he finished his research, the other half went with it. He was paranoid and mean and ungenerous and didn't care one jot for the future of Amestris or anything else."

Roy wasn't sure what he expected from her. She never spoke about her father, always drifted around him like a shade, but he always assumed that she still loved him, in the same obligatory way that people with parents were supposed to love them. (He wouldn't know.) He hadn't anticipated that she would harbor so much resentment, so much bitterness, toward the man, and felt a latent bit of superstition rub around his ankles like a needy cat at speaking ill of the dead. He realized that he didn't know much about her, and knew essentially nothing about her before he arrived in her home.  _How have I been around someone for so long but still know nothing about them?_

"In all likelihood," she continued, "he never planned to do anything with that research once he finished it. I think he knew he was dying, and that he wouldn't outlive his work by much. And as it was in his will to me, that means that--for whatever reason--he trusted me enough to do with it what I see fit." She weighed her next words carefully in front of her, as if testing their purity on a scale. In the firelight, she looked much older than the last time he looked at her. The shadows threw her newly-sharp cheekbones and the hollows her eye sockets into sharp relief. She looked a bit like a ghost.

"I like the idea of something my father wasted his life on being used to help people." Roy could feel his pulse throbbing wildly behind his cheekbones. "And if it, in some way, was used to give my mother's death a little dignity, I think he would like that."

At that moment, just a few months shy of seventeen, Riza Hawkeye truly thought that Roy Mustang's hands--long-fingered and delicate as a girl's, although bearing a few new calluses from clumsy attempts at manual labor--were the most suitable in the world to hold her father's work. That word, "dignity," would stick with them both as they grew and joined up with the State Alchemist Program. It seemed, at the time, to be a perfectly reasonable aspiration, nothing nearly as idealistic or utopian as Roy's "protecting the people of Amestris." Just give a dead woman a little peace and dignity.

She didn't lie to him, not in so many words at least, but she didn't tell him the whole truth either. Her reason for entrusting Roy Mustang with her father's research had much less to do with abstract ideals and much more to do with something more personal, something she kept tucked inside herself, safe, where nothing could harm it. She allowed Roy Mustang to take her father's research because she trusted him. At that point in her life, he was the only person she trusted, and she wasn't entirely sure why, but there was nothing she could do to stop it.

She realizes now, as her first view of the homunculus that wants to destroy her fragile new home comes into view, that there is very little dignity in what they do. There is death, and fear, and mistakes and mistakes and mistakes. But, as she watches the pilots-- _her_ pilots--move into battle, she thinks that there is also trust, and perhaps that is the most dangerous of all.

* * *

Alphonse had expected Central City, upon hearing that there was a homunculus poised to attack, to be in a state of pandemonium. But although he should have known better, he had underestimated the efficacy with which the State Alchemist Program would be able to evacuate the city's denizens. In their scramble to evade the watchful eyes of teachers and administrators who wanted to take them somewhere safe, Alphonse and Winry had managed to miss the mad dash out of the city center, and the congestion on the Tunnel and the buses. When they finally surfaced from Garfiel's into the blinding midday sunlight, what they found instead was perhaps more frightening than sheer chaos.

In the wake of the evacuation, Central City is a ghost town. In comparison with how the city had looked that morning, teeming with people, a constant hum of machines and cars and energy and heat, the contrast is particularly eerie, and Alphonse says as much.

"It's like we're the last people alive," Winry says dreamily. Al tries not to pick at her observation too much, but the impending doom of the monster at the edges of the city looms over his head like a cloud about to burst. Winry is lost in post-apocalyptic reverie for only a moment before she shifts back to her usual pragmatism like well-oiled gears slotting together. "The subway should still be running, let's hurry."

As if to counteract the strange stillness in the air around them, they run to the subway station. The city feels unreal, like a nightmare or a soundstage. They could be ants scrabbling over a model city and would have no way of knowing until a giant foot came down and crushed them where they stood. The screech of the cicadas--a disturbing, ever-present fixture in Central's environment--resounds in their ears like ringing, and, combined with the heat, their running feels dizzy and almost drunk. 

What they see when they get there chills the blood in their veins.

"It's closed," Winry says numbly.

"What do we do now?" Alphonse asks, staring at the very definitely  _closed_ means of them getting out of the city center and to HQ. There is anxiety coiling in his stomach, slick and oily. When faced with the apocalypse, Al hadn't quite expected everything to be so quiet, so anticlimactic. He hadn't expected his doom to be sealed by a subway station, either.

"What do you mean 'what do we do?'" Winry asks, hands on her hips in a fairly good imitation of Ed, if Al has to be honest. Living in the same apartment has made them adopt even more of each other's mannerisms. Were it not for Winry's shrewd blue eyes and their horribly bumbling attempts at denying they liked each other, she and Ed could be siblings. "We walk."

It's not a  _good_ idea, but it may, in fact, be the  _only_ idea that they have, given the situation. Central's usual bloodstream of buses and taxis is nowhere to be seen, and without the Tunnel, a car, or a bike, they're effectively stranded, and the longer they stand out in the open, the more likely it is that they'll come face-to-foot with the homunculus. 

"How far away is HQ?" It can't be close, that's for sure.

"It doesn't matter, Al, we need to get moving." She re-shoulders her school bag, the tightness around her eyes the only indication that she was feeling unsettled. "We can stand here and die or start walking and possibly not die."

There's no choice. There's never been a choice, not for Al, not since his mother died. Winry had the possibility of choice still, but when she packed up and moved out to Central with them, she gave that up too. It's just them, and they weren't going to be shipped off to some evacuation center where every other kid would have their family and they'd only have each other. It only makes sense that if Ed has to risk his life for them, they should risk theirs for him too. Winry and Al both know that Ed would disagree with them, vehemently, but Winry knows exactly what she would say as she looked down the several inches into Ed's eyes.

"It's only equivalent exchange."

She's not sure where he found it, but somewhere along the line Ed had come across a book on alchemy. Obviously the science was bunk now, but something about the tales of philosopher-chemists caught his interest, and in particular the idea of "equivalent exchange." Even when he had returned the book back to the Eastern University library, that phrase stuck in his mind, and he adopted it as a kind of mantra or personal philosophy. It irritated the hell out of Winry, but she couldn't deny the satisfaction that would come from taking his stupid slogan and throwing it back at his face.

More than the fear of what could possibly be their impending deaths, there's a fire burning in Winry's belly, and it's what unsticks her feet from the scorched pavement and sets her in motion, with Alphonse following at her heels.

 _I'm not going to be a burden. I'm tired of sitting at home and waiting around while Ed does all the work. I am strong and I am capable and I can do this._  

She believes every word of it.

* * *

Edward Elric has done enough simulations to make his eyes want to roll back into his head. He is what a polite teacher would call "a hands-on learner," and what a less charitable person (also known as "Dr. Izumi Curtis, who heads their training department and sufficiently kicked enough sense into Ed that, for once in his life, he was honest-to-God scared of someone") would call "a hyperactive little shit."

Ed has problems sitting still, always has, and it's only been exacerbated by the stiffness in his automail leg if he sits in one place for too long. He has to have his hands on everything and his nose in everyone's business. He's smart enough to know that this isn't an admirable trait to most people, but he's also smart enough to know that he's smarter than just about everyone he knows, and that he's good enough at what he does that he can have a little leeway with decorum.

Ed had told Dr. Curtis, Captain Hawkeye, Roy "lazy bastard" Mustang, and pretty much anybody else who would listen to him that the simulations were pointless. A homunculus isn't something you can distill down into a handful (or several thousand handfuls, as the case may be) of pixels and what looks like the setup for an arcade shoot-'em-up. As is not an uncommon experience in his young life, Ed was right.

He desperately, desperately wishes he wasn't.

The simulations had been based off of Greed and Gluttony, the only two documented homunculi to date. (Although if you asked that crazy dude on the History Channel, there had been homunculi forever, but humanity was "too deluded by its faux-rationalism and the Enlightenment to notice." Ed turned off the TV after that, grumbling something about the History Channel's name being a misnomer.) But, at that point, they knew next to nothing about what homunculi were, and so had no idea what a new one would look like.

Ed wagers that they probably didn't guess it would look like this.

"Is this monster one of your scorned girlfriends, Mustang?" Ed smirks into the comm in order to mask his anxiety.

"Now is  _not the time_ , Fullmetal," Mustang snarls.

"Oh, shit, I forgot we had snazzy codenames. Sorry about that,  _Flame_." Ed holds his tongue and avoids making the joke about how "you can't spell 'flame' without 'lame,'" which is an astounding feat of restraint that Mustang doesn't even know to appreciate. But what else is there to do in this situation aside from make bad jokes?

It doesn't take a particularly creative feat of imagination for Ed to imagine what they're going to name this homunculus once the dust settles and a new ream of paperwork makes its way to Captain Hawkeye's desk. They're going to call it Lust.

It's about the same size as they are, and with that deceptive lack of scale, it looks like a woman, albeit a naked one, with a strange symbol nestled in between her massive breasts. It's a snake eating its own tail, and something about it itches at the back of Ed's mind, quickly followed by a thought that is, annoyingly, narrated by Mustang's stupid baritone:  _Now is not the time_. They have much bigger issues to deal with than Ed's semiotic musings.

The homunculus is just standing there, grinning horribly, and it's creeping Ed the fuck out. She has a torrent of dark curls that fall into her eyes and over her breasts, and upturned, bloody-tinged eyes. If you ignored her terrifying size, her unnerving grin, and the marking on her chest, she could almost be beautiful.

"It isn't doing anything," Ed says pointlessly. 

"Clearly it was your skills of observation that got you through the university," Mustang comments.  _Cocky bastard_. "Let's not look a gift horse in the mouth. It hasn't caused any harm now, so let's get rid of it now before it decides to get angry." Mustang's eyes dart to the camera in his entry plug, symbolically locking eyes Hawkeye. "Is that okay with you, Captain?" 

It takes a moment, but Ed can see Hawkeye nod on the video link between his Alchemist and HQ. "Destroy it," she says sharply, and before the words have even left her lips completely, the Flame Alchemist is raising one massive, metal hand and aiming it at the still-grinning, motionless homunculus.

But something about it doesn't sit well with Ed. This isn't anything like any of those simulations, or like his previous experience with homunculi. It's not charging or knocking over buildings or anything. It's just standing there smiling. When Ed looks into its eyes he sees what looks almost like intelligence. Like it knows what it's doing. Like it knows what  _they're_ doing.

Not knowing what else to do, Ed asks an almost nervous "Hey, Mustang--"

"Shut up, Fullmetal," he says before a sharp jet of flame rushes toward, and then engulfs, the homunculus. 

Ed has heard plenty of stories of the State Alchemists. He was practically raised on them, like any child in the world who grew up in the wake of Gluttony and the destruction of Ishval and parts of the Eastern Quadrant. He had heard tell of how the Strong Arm Alchemist could punch through rock or steel, of how the Crimson Lotus Alchemist (before its pilot mysteriously disappeared) had a massive arsenal of bombs that could rival entire armies, and how the Flame Alchemist could incinerate whole swaths of land in less than a second.

But he has to admit, being told about the Flame Alchemist did little to prime his mind for what he saw. It isn't impressive, like he had been told. It's  _terrifying_.  _  
_

After what Mustang determines to be a sufficient amount of time to torch a homunculus, the flames stop, and the Alchemist lowers its hand. The silence following the assault is ambivalent: Should they be celebratory? Relieved? Worried? As they wait for the smoke to clear, the silence is mostly tense, and Ed's hands grip around his controls.

What follows probably takes less than thirty seconds, but for Ed, it's as if the entire exchange takes hours, years even. The smoke clears and instead of a pile of ash the size of a skyscraper, there stands the homunculus, perfectly fine, and through the smoke they can hear her laughing. The sound has the time to send chills up Ed's spine, but not much more than that.

"Mustang, get out of there!" Captain Hawkeye shouts over the comm, but the Flame Alchemist is now as eerily still as the homunculus, as if its otherworldly laughter has hypnotized him. "Mustang!" she repeats, sounding slightly more frantic. "Frantic" and "Hawkeye" were not two words that Ed thought would ever be in the same sentence together, and it has him frightened. The Captain only gets out the first syllable of another "Mustang!" before, in one catlike motion, they see the homunculus raise a lithe arm. In the next instant, two long, black spears extend from its index and middle fingers, and they skewer the Flame Alchemist through its metal heart.

* * *

The ceilings in Central HQ's main observation deck are high by necessity. They have to be at least as tall as the Alchemists, in order to accommodate them, and gives the entire underground building the feelings of a cavern. Breda liked to joke that it was the Bat Cave and that Mustang--dark-haired, brooding, parentless, and womanizing as he was--was their own personal Bruce Wayne. Mustang had been suitably offended: "Batman? Really? You think I'm the most boring superhero in existence?" This sparked a lively debate with Falman who, it turned out, was a big Batman fan and was incredibly defensive about it. Riza, who had been sitting with Rebecca drinking coffee, rolled her eyes as Rebecca let out a long-suffering sigh.

"The fate of the world is in the hands of these massive  _nerds_ ," Rebecca moaned. "They could at least be sexy nerds."

This offended Mustang even more than being compared to Batman.

Generally, the feel of Central HQ was secure, even stately. But today, Riza curses the damned high ceilings for creating a near-perfect acoustical space, so that Roy Mustang's screams can reverberate off the walls as if rattling around inside of her own skull. 

For a moment, maybe half of a moment, Riza is frozen still in her seat as she listens to the agony of the boy who fell off of her roof, who had pretty, un-callused hands, who wanted to protect people. It only occurs to her after that that this isn't that boy, this is Roy Mustang, pilot of the Flame Alchemist, who scorched an entire country and half of another one in pursuit of a monster, who was in the dedicated process of drinking and smoking and fucking himself into an early grave, and who let her sleep on his couch. When those two seemingly contradictory sets of knowledge collide in her mind, the force of their collision is enough to send her upright, to Havoc's desk.

"His vitals are going crazy, Captain," Havoc says, voice strained as he listens to the screams of the man who is his friend, too, and in much more uncomplicated terms than he is Riza's. "His respiration is stuttering and his brain is losing oxygen quickly."

It didn't matter that the claws of the homunculus had gotten nowhere near Mustang's entry plug. The PSL, the same substance that allowed pilots to synchronize with their Alchemists, also allowed them to feel any injury that the Alchemists got. While Mustang may physically be uninjured, he felt as if he had just had his heart gouged out.

"Raise the oxygenation level as much as you can. The last thing we need is him passing out on us."

"I think we have more to worry about with him passing out from the pain, not the lack of oxygen, ma'am."

Even with her hair pinned up, Riza can feel the sweat beginning to bead on the back of her neck. "Do what you can to keep him lucid; I'll try and get him out of there."

"Armstrong, get Mustang back to headquarters now," Riza commands, gripping her microphone harder than it requires.

"But the homunculus--" Armstrong protests.

"I don't  _care_ about the homunculus, get Mustang  _out of there_. He's in no condition to fight." 

Ultimately, Armstrong nods, and his Alchemist scoops up the Flame Alchemist--which had crumpled to its knees like a grieving widow--as easily as if it were a doll.

At the sight of this, the homunculus's laugh--which had been a low, husky rumble--erupts into a series of high, howling peals. The sound of it causes Riza's face to burn with something like shame. They're getting laughed at by a monster.

"Congratulations, Ed," Riza says into the microphone. "Looks like we need backup."

She expects him to have a snarky response at the ready, but instead she is greeted with radio silence. Fuery, in his infinite mercy, had silenced Mustang's comm line.

"Ed?"

The Fullmetal Alchemist, glistening in the afternoon sunlight, is standing stock-still.

Riza shoots a nervous glance at Havoc. He's lighting a cigarette with shaking fingers and typing frantically into his computer with his other hand. "His sync rate is dropping quickly, Captain. It's...Fuck, I can't believe this, it's nearing zero."

"That can't be right, it was fine just a minute ago."

Havoc laughs his nervous, raspy laugh. "You know how these things go, Cap. The sync rate is only as stable as the pilot's mind."

She knows. She knows this far too well. And bad things happen when the sync rate is too unstable in either direction. It could leave them catatonic and ultimately useless if it swings too low, or decomposed like Kimblee if it swings too high.

"So what are you saying?"

Havoc laughs again. "I'm not sure if the kid can pilot like this."

Riza grits her teeth. "Well that's not an option." She grips the microphone again. "Ed, I need you to fight the homunculus." There's no response. She turns to Fuery. "Is his line on?"

Fuery's large eyes look sheepish and sad as he nods.

She tries again. "Ed--"

"I can't."

The voice she hears on the other end of the comm line is small, nothing at all like the normal bravado she associates with Edward Elric. "You have to."

"I  _can't_ ," he repeats, now sounding, bizarrely, on the verge of tears. Checking the screen, she sees that he's right. He's grasping at the controls and nothing is happening. The Fullmetal Alchemist won't move.

"Yes you can, Edward, just breathe." She's not sure anymore if she's talking to him or herself. "It's not moving; it's not going anywhere. Just take a step forward. That's all you have to do."

"A step forward..." Ed repeats, dazed.

"Yes, that's it, that's all you have to do."

It feels like ages, but the Fullmetal Alchemist does manage to take one shaky step forward, like a baby fawn. 

"Good," Riza says in what she hopes is a soothing tone. She's never been particularly maternal, and so having to be now feels awkward, like walking in high heels. "Now you just--"

And then, just as quickly as it had speared Mustang, the homunculus sends its two pointed fingers into the Fullmetal Alchemist's stomach.

Riza has heard enough screaming for today. Riza has heard enough screaming for a lifetime. As terrible as it was to hear the agony of her oldest friend, there is something especially perverse in hearing the screams of a child.

She grips Havoc hard by the shoulder. "I thought you said his sync rate was nearly zero! He shouldn't even be able to feel this!"

Havoc grimaces. "It had gone up, Captain."

The blood drains from Riza's face. Greed and Gluttony, as far as she could tell, had just been mindless brutes. Dangerous, violent, and unpredictable, but mindless nonetheless. But this...this was as if the homunculus had something resembling human thought and cognition, as if... "It knows. It knows the sync rates of the pilots. Otherwise it would've attacked when Ed was still frozen. But it wouldn't have been incapacitating." She looks at Havoc with eyes full of fear that she hopes none of the rest of them can see. " _How does it know?_ "

"I don't know," he says. "I don't know."

* * *

"Why is this city so goddamn hot?" Winry moans, plucking at the collar of her white uniform shirt.

"Because when Greed attacked it melted the Drachman ice caps and the sea levels and temperature rose. Not to mention that we're in a city, and the amount of concrete coupled with the high concentration of people and motor vehicles--"

"Al, I know  _why_ , I just wanted to complain." Being friends with geniuses was occasionally quite taxing. Ed was generally more receptive to her complaints. Well, maybe not  _receptive_ , but at least he always had something cathartic to say. Sometimes when you're complaining the best thing to do is have a good argument, and lord knows Ed has those in spades. "Do you have any idea how far we are from HQ?"

Al looks around at the desolate cityscape. "I'm pretty sure we're still in the city center."

Winry groans and plops down gracelessly on the pavement. It stings a bit against her exposed thighs but she doesn't really care. Fuck unifrom skirts. Fuck decorum. And fuck this  _goddamn heat_. 

Al crosses his arms across his chest. "What happened to 'We can stand here and die or we can start walking'?"

"I'm just resting," Winry says. She slings her book bag from her shoulder and into her lap, unzipping it and pulling out her water battle. She takes a long swig, not caring when it dribbles a bit down her chin, and hands it to Al, who does the same. "Seriously, since this heat is a homunculus's fault, I'll fight it myself." _  
_

Winry watches, confused, as the water bottle falls from Alphonse's hand, rolling and spilling greedily onto the parched pavement.

"What is it, Al?" Winry asks.

"I think you may get your chance."

Winry turns to see what Al can see, and she's glad that she's already sitting down, because she thinks any strength in her legs is gone.

She doesn't remember the homunculus destroying the Elrics' home. She was asleep at the time, and when she woke up the deed had already been done: her best friends had become orphans, and one of them was near-fatally wounded. She woke up to Pinako banging at her door to call an ambulance while Edward nearly bled out on their kitchen table. Al had carried him over a mile to their home, and the front of his t-shirt was stained a rusty brown. But even with those horrors, Winry never saw the homunculus itself.

What she never could have anticipated was the sheer size of it. She's tall for a girl her age, and so she's used to being taller than her female classmates and taller than Ed, but she's not exceptionally tall by any means. She knows how it feels to stand in people's shadows. But this is completely different. This is like standing next to a god. This is finally realizing how tiny and insignificant and  _fragile_ human beings are.

But then, almost just as terrifying, is the sight of the Alchemist. From behind a pane of glass, she could only see its head, with its slightly menacing jaw and teeth. But here, in the open, standing amongst buildings smaller than itself, it's an entirely different experience. Especially with its red and black color scheme, the Fullmetal Alchemist looks positively demonic standing on the other end of the scene.  _But Ed's in there_ , she has to remind herself. It's odd to think that inside of that massive metal behemoth is the tiny Edward Elric. It seems almost unbelievable.

The Fullmetal Alchemist is walking slowly, almost mechanically, toward the homunculus. And then, as if sensing that it now had an audience to impress, the homunculus--who looks like an impossibly tall Aerugan Renaissance sculpture--raises an arm, and then two spear-like appendages jut out like bullets and pierce the Alchemist in its middle. 

"Ed!" Winry calls out instinctively, and then covers her mouth.

"I doubt the homunculus can hear us," Alphonse says. The scale is deceiving, and Winry knows that. Because they're so huge the Alchemist and the homunculus look much closer than they are.

"We have to get closer," Winry says.

"What? Are you crazy? We could get killed!"

"I need to make sure Ed is okay."

"You remember what Riza said; the Alchemist gets hurt so that he doesn't have to."

"Then why isn't he moving?"

Al looks up at his brother's Alchemist, and sure enough, Winry was right. The Alchemist stands, its giant hand placed over its stomach. Completely stationary. 

"Ed!" Winry shouts again, but she isn't sure why. He can't hear her. And even if he could, what good would it do? "What do we do, Al?"

"I don't know," Alphonse says. "I don't know."

* * *

If you got Colonel Olivier Mira Armstrong exceptionally drunk, she would tell you war stories. 

After the melting of the Drachman ice caps, the northern border of Amestris was inundated with refugees. This would become a common occurrence in the next few years with the decimation of Ishval, but at the time, Amestris wasn't nearly equipped for this sudden influx of Drachmans. And so, to put it simply, they panicked. Amestris already had a nasty history of xenophobia, and it reared its ugly head then, to keep any unwanted people out of its borders. A fort was established within a year, a fort situated on a massive wall separating Drachma from Amestris, called Briggs. Olivier used to serve there.

She isn't one to rest on her laurels or to look back at her successes fondly. Unlike Mustang, though, she isn't one to look too far into the future either. She lives firmly in the now. But occasionally she will dredge up the murkier parts of her military history, which, even for an officer as accomplished and talented as she is, do exist.

Once Riza asked her what her worst experience had been at Briggs. Olivier told her that once, under her watch, a subordinate of hers named Buccaneer was killed. Soldiers die every day, even in what are relatively tame border disputes like the one with Drachma, but this hit Olivier particularly hard. She felt that she was personally responsible for Buccaneer's death and that she should have prevented it.

"So what did you do?" Riza asked.

"At a certain point you sit back and realize that the worst thing that could have happened to you has happened to you. There's a certain kind of comfort in that."

Riza thinks, looking at Ed standing lead-footed in front of the homunculus, that Olivier is full of shit. There is no comfort in this. There is only fear and, steeping in her stomach like a particularly bitter bag of tea, guilt. These are  _her_ pilots. She had scouted Ed herself, had argued with the General about taking on a child, and he had told her point-blank that any harm that came to Edward Elric would be, directly or indirectly, her fault. She is the one who had gotten Armstrong out of Ishval when it became clear that if he participated it would be at the cost of his own sanity. And Mustang...she's always felt responsible for Mustang, in one way or another. He carries the only piece of her father worth carrying in this world. He has the only bits of her childhood that matter. If she loses them, any of them, it wouldn't just be a loss of equipment, like what you would see on the books. It would be a loss of parts of herself, parts she would never get back.

"Uh, Captain?" Fuery asks, hands shaking as he lowers his headset form his ears. "I think you should have a look at this."

Fuery gestures to his console which, for some reason, has an innocuous view of a street a couple blocks over from the fight.

"Why are you showing me this, Fuery?"

"Because of this." He points at two yellow specks on the road. Riza is confused, and is about to ask what's so important about two random specks, when Fuery zooms in and it becomes abundantly clear why they're so important.

"You have got to be fucking kidding me." All of the civilians were supposed to be out of the city. Riza thought that Alphonse and Winry were the only two things she  _didn't_ have to worry about right now. Her mind races. This was not something she had figured into any of her contingency plans. The complete evacuation of all of Central City's civilians population was taken as a given. Never,  _never_ , did she think that two children would have somehow managed to slip past the evacuation orders. And for what? Why?

There are only two choices: tell Ed or not tell Ed. If she didn't, there was a good chance they could possibly get him back to a stable frame of mind and get him synced back up. (But his sync rate was almost back to zero again, and that was probably for the best, seeing as how the homunculus seemed to know when he was or wasn't synced properly, so as to cause him maximum pain.) But if she did, then he could figure out a way to move them to safety, maybe even put them in the entry plug if he had to.

She can see the homunculus waiting and almost looking bored. There is only so much time they can buy, and ultimately playing with your food only yields so much satisfaction before you break and go in for the kill. There's still Armstrong, once he gets back from dropping off Mustang to the medical staff, but she's not sure if they have that kind of time.

 _Either way_ , she thinks.  _We're fucked. We can either sit here and let it kill us, or we can stand up and die fighting._ And so she swallows her fear and grabs the microphone tentatively.

"Edward?" she asks as softly as she can manage. There's no response. Looking at the monitor she can see Ed staring dully at nothing.  _At least he isn't screaming anymore_. But is this really better? This dead-eyed stare? This isn't Ed. He'd rather die screaming than silent any day, and Riza knows this. "Edward, I..." She swallows around her heart, which seems to have permanently taken up residence in her throat. HQ is as silent as a tomb. "I don't want to alarm you, but there are two civilians on the street, a couple blocks away from you, who seem to have missed the evacuation." Edward still says nothing. "Edward...it's Alphonse and Winry. It's your brother."

She thinks she sees a flicker of something behind his eyes, but it may have been a trick of the light or a glitch on the monitor.

"Fuery, is there any way you can show Ed what you showed me?"

Fuery nods and types something into his computer before sending it over with a resounding click. 

"It's your brother, Ed," Riza says again. "It's your brother and Winry. They're on the street and they could get killed if you don't do anything."

The flicker hadn't been a trick. It's there. As if coming out of an anesthetic fog, Riza watches as life returns to Edward Elric's big, gold eyes. "What...what are they doing there?"

At hearing his voice again, Riza allows herself a bit of relief. "I don't know Ed, but if you don't do something they could get seriously hurt. At this point, the subway has been shut, so they're stuck in the city."

Ed chances a look to his right, where, from his vantage point several hundred feet in the air, he can just distinguish them, two small drops of gold on the ground. As his head turns, the Alchemist's follows, and this sparks the homunculus's interest. It grins and begins sauntering slowly, almost playfully, over to where Alphonse and Winry are hiding.

Riza begins to shout for Edward to notice what is happening, but she doesn't have to. The easiest way to get Edward Elric to do anything is to put the lives of his family on the line.  _I pray to God no one uses that against you_. 

" _Don't you fucking dare!"_

Edward shouts so loud that it sends a crackle through the airwaves and Fuery jumps from under his headphones.

"Captain?" Havoc calls.

"What is it?"

"His sync rate had been at 6% for the last few minutes. But now it's at 98% and climbing."

Anything higher than 50% was exceptional. Higher that 70% was unheard of. This was verging into the territory that Kimblee had been in when he...

"Havoc, you don't think..."

Before either she or Havoc can finish that thought, the thought is finished for them by what Riza could only describe as a howl, like some sort of beast screaming at the moon. Riza looks at the monitor and sees the Fullmetal Alchemist's jaw unhinge, hanging open and monstrous. From its ordinarily erect posture, it had fallen into an almost animalistic crouch, and seemed to be panting. 

Riza was right. It had gone berserk.

The Fullmetal Alchemist ran forward so fast that it detached itself from its umbilical cable. Because of their size, Alchemists can only last a few minutes once they've gone wireless before the battery life depletes. It's a risky maneuver, but not an uncommon one. But Alchemists, at their best, tend to lumber about because of their size. Even with Fullmetal's slimmer build, this kind of speed is unimaginable. Before the homunculus has a chance to move, the Fullmetal Alchemist grabs it with a hand, and then--releasing the retractable blade from its other arm--drives its knife with an incomprehensible amount of force into the homunculus's solar plexus, right into the strange symbol. The homunculus splutters, clearly taken off guard, but the Fullmetal Alchemist slices down and neatly cleaves it in half.

The insides of homunculi are up for debate, as very little is known about them. But one feature they do all share is the abundance of a thick, red, blood-like substance. The now-cleft homunculus becomes a fountain of it, covering not only the Fullmetal Alchemist, but also all the surrounding buildings and streets. Riza can see on Fuery's monitor that Winry and Alphonse are covered in it as well, and it makes her stomach turn.

If Ed were in his right mind, he would've stopped there. But something about syncing with an Alchemist that deeply brought out the animal in a person, and Riza watched as Edward Elric--the fifteen-year-old boy with the dirty mouth and the tacky fashion sense and the undeniable, earth-shaking love for his brother--rent it limb from limb. 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trying to come up with what Lust would look like as a giant monster was a little difficult, but I decided that she'd probably look something like Rei when she fuses with Lilith in End of Eva. For reference: http://minesblog.com/anime/files/2010/11/46113-800px_m26_c130_zomgrei_super.jpg
> 
> Also apparently Batman is a thing in this AU?? Idk the reference came out before I could stop it.
> 
> Chapter title is from "Self Esteem," by Andrew Jackson Jihad


	8. Unknown Ceilings

Roy Mustang is no stranger to strange ceilings. Between his history of one-night-stands and getting blackout drunk on various occasions, he has woken up in many places that he couldn't remember getting to. His personal favorite, still, is waking up in someone's garden shed back in East City. He hadn't even remembered going to East City, let alone getting inside of someone's shed, but then again, that's why it's his favorite. But those stories, while tinged with a little bit of shame or chagrin, are generally lighthearted romps. None of those stories end with him waking up in a hospital. 

After a few moments' acclimation, he looks to the lone chair situated in the room, knowing who will be there in the same way the terminally ill know what will be in their x-rays.

Riza is sitting with her legs crossed almost daintily, reading a paperback mystery novel. It was one of her quirks that Roy could never understand. They spend their entire lives trying to unravel the great mysteries of the universe, and she spends her time reading trashy detective fiction? When Roy had told her this she had simply shrugged in the way she does and said "I like figuring it out before the detective does. Fiction is always so simple."

He doesn't have to say anything. As if reading the book with one eye and watching him with the other, Riza knows it when he wakes up.

"How are you feeling?" she asks, delicately folding down the corner of her page and closing the book.

This was always the worst part. Unless something happened directly to the entry plug, chances were that the pilots would escape completely unscathed. The blinding pain he had experienced the night before--Was it the night before? He had no idea how long he had been out.--now seemed like nothing more than a bad dream. It was unnerving. He liked his pain to feel real.

"Fine," he croaks, and his throat feels dry and sandy as the desert that stretches between Ishval and Xing. He's never been to Xing, but he thinks he'd like to go someday. He could have one of those romantic journeys that orphans often take in the media, to maybe find his parents or at least reconnect with his roots. To be frank, though, he couldn't care less about the family that had birthed him. If they had wanted him enough, or had the means to want him, then he would still be in Xing or wherever they were. As far as he was concerned, he had all the family he needed. "How long have I been out?"

"About two days," Riza says lightly, as if sleeping for forty-eight straight hours were the most natural thing in the world. "I've been splitting my time between your room and Edward's."

"Ah. How is the pipsqueak doing?"

"He woke up last night."

Well  _that's_ embarrassing.

"How much do you remember?" Riza asks.

"I remember the homunculus stabbing me in the chest and then I think I passed out."

He's glad that this is Riza and not anybody else here so that no one else has to know precisely how fucking embarrassed he is. He is  _Roy Mustang_ , pilot of the infamous Flame Alchemist, and he lasted maybe five minutes before fainting like some kind of damsel in a romance novel. Even though her eyes are big and brown and unreadable as ever, he knows she isn't judging him, not for his performance in the sortie and not for feeling ashamed. He can ease back to being Roy Mustang with her here.

"Armstrong carried you back to HQ and you've been in the hospital since then," Riza says calmly. "After that, Edward's sync rate dropped dramatically and we were afraid he wouldn't be able to pilot. But then we found out that his brother and Winry Rockbell had somehow managed to avoid the evacuation orders, and when we told him that he..." Riza looks off at something that Roy can't see before saying "The Alchemist went berserk."

It's funny how two little syllables, innocuous enough on their own, when strung together could conjure such vivid memories of a desert on fire, of a monster with a huge, gaping mouth matched in monstrosity by a massive, blindingly white Alchemist that was bombing everything in its path. For not the first time since Ishval, Roy wondered if they weren't, in fact, doing more harm than good.

"It was strange, though," Riza says, and Roy finds himself enthralled. Riza is not one to acknowledge when the universe is not behaving as it should. Like a good scientist, she takes each anomaly and welcomes it into the infinitely complex fold of her idea of reality. She is not one to sit and contemplate the bizarre. "This is the first homunculus attack that, as far as we can tell, resulted in no casualties. The Alchemist went berserk, but it destroyed the homunculus and nothing else. By the time it was done, the battery life had run out and it collapsed."

"Do you think we have another Kimblee on our hands?" Roy flexes his own hands nervously in the stiff hospital bedsheets.

"No," Riza says staunchly, and there it is again, that absolute certainty has returned, her own stalwart nature that Roy found so comforting in times like this. "Kimblee was always unstable, even before Ishval. Ed..." He can practically see the gears turning behind her large eyes. "Ed was just trying to protect his family." There's something in her brow that he can't name, but if he had to, it would almost look like surprise. "He's nothing like Kimblee." But then the spell is broken, and Riza slips back into her role of Captain Hawkeye. There is a practically tangible shift in the air, and Roy knows too that he can't be Roy much longer. They need Roy Mustang, defender of the world, not Roy, cripplingly embarrassed by his own failure and musing on his murky childhood. That man would do no good for anyone.

"But I should be leaving now," Hawkeye says suddenly, placing the novel into her bag and then lifting the strap over her head and onto her shoulder. She has a way of making even satchels look like military equipment, and Roy sneaks a quick glance to the gun that is, like always, strapped to her thigh.

"Need to go check on your charge?" Roy asks, already slipping into the cheeky banter he's known for.

One side of Hawkeye's mouth lifts, almost imperceptibly, but Roy knows her well enough by now to not miss it. "Something like that." She waves to him over her shoulder as she exits the room, in perfect time for Roy to hear the unmistakable voice of Maes Hughes booming down the hall.

"Roy Mustang, do I have the perfect thing to expedite your recovery! My little Elicia is so cute she could probably cure cancer, so I'm sure she'll do wonders for you!"

Roy has just a few seconds until he has to pretend that this display of paternal affection really does irk him as much as everyone thinks it does. But for now, he can lay his head back on the flat hospital pillow and allow himself an indulgent, sleepy smile.

* * *

It's a real toss-up as to who is the angriest with Winry and Alphonse for sneaking out of their school in the middle of a homunculus attack, Edward or Riza. Their styles of anger are incredibly different, so comparing them doesn't yield much in the way of conclusions. Riza's anger is slow and simmering, quiet, but impossible to ignore. Ed's, however, is a bit like a fork in a microwave: bright, noisy, and more than a little bit dangerous for everyone involved.

But the little Elric family is a volatile bunch, and it's not enough for Ed and Riza to be upset. Ed being angry makes Winry angry in defense, and she begins a lengthy rant about how Ed shouldn't expect her to wait at home like some kind of army wife while he risks his life to protect them, and how the fact that he  _does_ expect her to do exactly that is not only a product of his inherent sexism ("I'm not a sexist, Winry!" Ed shrieks, but Winry's glare at being interrupted could melt steel. "Excuse you, I wasn't done talking."), but is in direct violation of something called "equivalent exchange."

Ed's face begins the whole debacle in a shade of affronted pink, but with each allegation leveled against him by Winry it transitions to ever deepening levels of scarlet (particularly at the "army wife" comment, Riza notes, and she can tell that Al does too, because he shoots her a conspiratorial glance), finally ending at an incredibly unbecoming garnet.

As much as Riza hates to admit it, Winry does have a point. While it was  _incredibly_ stupid of them to try and navigate the empty city on their own with a giant monster who wanted to kill them all (and almost did) on the loose, she knows that, had the situation been reversed, she wouldn't have been content shuffled off to some evacuation bunker while her family was off fighting the good fight. Winry's blue eyes are blazing with angry tears, and Alphonse (who had been the only level-headed person in Ed's hospital room) has his arms crossed defiantly across his chest. 

"Aren't you even a  _little bit_ touched that we would risk our lives to see you?" Winry asks, her voice beginning to show the hairline fractures of anger segueing into hurt. Riza knows Winry well enough by this point to know that she doesn't see crying as a sign of weakness, but also knows that no one likes crying in front of their family. It's never a situation that gets any easier, although Riza doesn't know. She can't remember the last time she cried. Mustang has the uncanny habit of shedding her tears for her.

Ed's face, which is beginning to cool off to its usual hue, turns to the wall so that he doesn't have to meet Winry's eyes. His voice is small as he says "I didn't ask you to do that. It's my job to protect  _you_ , not the other way around."

"Well that's just stupid," Winry says, sounding, for once, like the teenage girl she actually is. "And we weren't protecting you, either. What do you think we were going to do? Kick the homunculus in the shins?"

Winry's attempt at levity goes unnoticed. "You should have gone to safety. You and Al, both," Ed says, shooting a look at his brother that is more disapproving than angry.

And then, like the first drop of rain before a particularly nasty thunderstorm, a single tear rolls down Winry's cheek at remarkably high speeds and collides with the tile floor. "You don't have to do everything on your own, you know." And with that she stands up crisply and stalks off down the hallway.

This left Riza, Ed, Al, and a situation that Riza was fairly sure she had never been trained to deal with. She functioned fine as a peacekeeper with her own men and women, her own subordinates, who, despite what some might say to the contrary, are actually adults and not legally under her guardianship in any manner other than professionally. She managed to miss the squabbles of teenagerhood in the same way she missed most of the mundane trappings of being a child, and so she wasn't sure how this was supposed to work. But she could tell by the set of Al's shoulders that he wanted to speak with his brother alone, and by the way Ed's face was still studying the bare white wall that they weren't going to speak with her there.

"I'll go check on Winry," she says, a bit awkwardly, and heads out of the room, closing the door quietly behind her.

It's been a long few days, and she still hasn't completely recovered the sleep that she lost the night before the homunculus attack, sleeping as she has in various hospital chairs. Al and Winry came after the first night to relieve her of her sentry duties over Ed, and so she moved to Mustang's room instead. Various people have tried to take over that position--Hughes, Havoc, Breda, and even Fuery--but she was reluctant to give it up. Even more so than the situation with Ed, Riza feels particularly responsible for landing Mustang in the hospital, and so she feels that, while the punishment may not exactly be just, it at least serves her right to have to sleep sitting up in a stiff armchair. She dreams absently of Rebecca's bathtub, the one in her fancy new private apartment that she lets Riza use on occasion, and what wonders that would do for the kinks in her neck and her spine as she puts a couple hundred  _cenz_ in a vending machine and watches as it plops out two identical styrofoam cups and spits somewhat dubious looking coffee into each. 

Riza has never quite got the hang of talking to people without some sort of pretense, and so she has become a master of getting people coffee or tea without asking.  _Bars,_ she thinks,  _are a wonderful invention. Not only can you go out under the guise of getting drinks, but then you have alcohol to speed things along_. She's not even sure if Winry drinks coffee, or how she takes it if she does, but she carries the warm little cup anyway. If nothing else, it'll give Winry something to do with her hands.

She finds her on a bench a little ways from Mustang's room. It's close enough that she can hear the conversation that Hughes and Mustang are having (if you could call it a conversation; "conversation" usually implies an exchange of ideas, but she's not sure Mustang could get a word in if he tried) through the open door, but they probably can't see her.

"...and did you know that she stopped crying immediately? The girl's a chocolate fiend, just like her mother! Gracia made her a chocolate cake once, and she just stuck her whole face in it, it was adorable!"

Winry manages a small smile at that, and then a slightly bigger one when they can hear Mustang reply, in a much-put-upon voice, "Hughes,  _I don't care about your sticky child_." Riza knows this is a lie, and Hughes does too, but their little dance is still fun to watch and listen to.

"I brought you some coffee," Riza says, putting a hand out. 

"Thank you," Winry says and takes it the cup from her, but she doesn't drink it, just grips it loosely between her hands.  _That's probably for the best_ , Riza thinks. She's no stranger to hospitals (none of them are at this point, not after Ishval), and the horrifying nature of hospital coffee is the stuff of urban legend.

"May I?" Riza asks, gesturing to the bench with her free hand. Winry nods and makes room for her. Riza sits and takes an experimental (and immediately regretted) sip of her coffee, mainly because, if she didn't, she isn't sure she'd be able to stay awake. She says nothing, allowing the mellifluous extolling of the Hughes women's virtues and Mustang's occasional bickering (which, with the rising amount of vitriol, also allows Riza to know that he's getting better) to fill the silence until Winry decides she wants to talk. There's nothing worse than people expecting words out of you that you don't want, or don't know how, to say.

"Was I wrong?" she asks, voice quiet so that Hughes and Mustang can't overhear. "In what I did?"

Riza considers this. "In principle, perhaps, no. But there are better ways of proving yourself to be capable than putting your life at risk."

Winry sighs, letting her flaxen head fall against the wall behind them. "I don't know what else to do, though. I mean, I'm fifteen. I can't exactly be firing missiles or inventing weapons or anything."

"And you don't have to. That's not your job. You're still a child, Winry, however much you might like to believe otherwise."

"But so is Ed!" she shouts suddenly, her spine straightening. "Everyone always forgets that! Just because he has a college degree and is a genius and can pilot a stupid fucking robot doesn't mean he isn't a kid, too! But nobody says anything when he's out fighting and possibly dying, only when me and Al try to do the same."

Winry's cheeks are flushed and her eyes are bright, this time with righteous indignation instead of tears.

"I hate feeling useless," Winry continues, staring into the blackness of her coffee, as if perhaps it held some answers. "But that's all I ever feel anymore."

Although Winry is much more forthcoming about it than she ever was, looking down at her she is hit with a sudden wave of empathy. She knows exactly how that feels. That first year, of her and Mustang sharing a tiny apartment in Central while he went to Central U and she sat alone, studying for the entrance exams she knew she could pass in her sleep and trying vainly to figure out what she wanted to do with her life now that it no longer included taking care of her father, was the most useless she had ever felt. It was amazing how having every option in the world still made her feel like there was nothing she could do save letting Mustang have her father's research. That kind of passivity drove her stir-crazy. It was then that she started working out obsessively, just to give her body something to do that didn't require her mind, and she began toying with the idea of following Mustang. No, not following, that sounded so lazy. Generally, if you follow someone that means they want you there, maybe even asked for you to come, but she knew that Mustang wouldn't want her to go military. She was still the weird girl with the gun to him, and he felt responsible for her, even with their two year age difference and the fact that she was, and still is, better at taking care of herself than he is. That feeling of atrophy, of stillness, was the worst feeling in the world, more stagnant and useless than grief, and she knew that if someone were talking to her, prepared to spit out a diatribe of there being different kinds of strength, that there is no shame in not being a soldier, she would have spat in their faces.

And so she doesn't. 

"Are you serious about what you're saying?" Riza asks instead.

Winry misinterprets Riza's question as incredulity. "Of course I am!" she says, eyes blazing.

Riza takes a contemplative sip of her coffee. It seems that all she makes now are bad decisions. She can practically hear the satisfied, smug voice of Maes Hughes in her ear: "You've gone soft, Riza."  _Serves me right._

"Then how about I give you something to do?"

Winry blinks, confused. "What do you mean?"

"You said you wanted to go to college so that you could come back and help with the Alchemists, right?" Winry nods, still not catching on. "What if I said you didn't have to wait that long?"

Winry's mouth falls open slightly. "Are you serious?"

Riza nods. "One of my best friends is in charge of our engineering department and Alchemist maintenance. She's always complaining that there aren't enough women in the Program, so I'm sure she'd be happy to take you on as an apprentice."

Winry's smile is blinding. "That would be amazing!"

"Of course, you're still going to be expected to go to school and keep up with your studies. And this isn't going to be an easy job. Rebecca's a big softie, but she won't take it easy on you just because you're a kid or just because you're a girl. This is incredibly important work, and the safety of Ed, the rest of the pilots, and the whole world, essentially, are on the line."

The set of Winry's jaw is steely. "Of course."

Riza looks at her, suddenly serious. "So if I let you do this, will you promise me that you and Al won't sneak off anymore? I'm serious about this."

"Absolutely," Winry says, and there is no guile or trickery in her large eyes.

Riza heaves a sigh and downs the rest of her coffee in one, letting the bitterness and the burn act as punishment for, once again, letting her emotions get the better of her.  _You never used to be this way_ , she reminds herself.  _You used to be so hard; what's happening to you?_ "Good. Then when we get back I'll get on the phone to Rebecca and we'll get this sorted out."

She almost expects Winry to hug her (which would, of everything that has happened in the last few days, be the one thing she was sure she absolutely would not know how to handle), but instead she throws up a clumsy salute which, despite all it lacks in specificity, makes up more than enough in earnestness. 

"Now will you please go and apologize to Ed for almost getting yourself and his only brother killed?" 

Winry laughs, bright as a bell, hopping blithely off the bench. "Maybe," she says coyly, and speeds back toward his room. 

Riza isn't sure if it's the cheap hospital coffee sitting on her empty stomach or the new worry that she has yet another person whose safety that she has to guarantee, but she feels vaguely nauseous.

"Wait a second," comes Maes Hughes's booming tenor. "Is that the illustrious Riza Hawkeye I hear?"

She chuckles despite herself. All her training in stealth and she can't even hide from her own friends. 

He pops his head out the door of Mustang's room. "Hey, Riza! I've got a brand new batch of Elicia pictures on my phone if you'd like to see them!"

"I'm friends with you on Facebook, Maes. You and Gracia. If I wanted to see pictures of Elicia I could find them myself."

He scrunches his nose. "I swear, all of you are bitter, bitter souls, unable to even be touched by the purity and innocence of my beautiful daughter."

"I prefer your beautiful daughter in person," is Riza's measured reply.

"As do I," Hughes says with a heavy sigh. "But  _someone_ ," he shoots a dark look back into Mustang's room. "Can't seem to escape getting banged up, and so here I am, in some grim hospital when I could be enjoying the bliss of family life."

"I think they'll still be there when you get home," Riza replies levelly.

"And that's the best part," he says, eyes twinkling, and Riza thinks that, perhaps, that response may not be a part of his "bumbling, busybody father" routine. It makes Riza's toes shift awkwardly in her boots, as if he had just told her a secret she wasn't supposed to hear. "But anyway, it looks like the wild Mustang, here, is going to be let out tonight and we were thinking of going for drinks if you'd like to join us?"

While the absurd amount of stress she has been under for the last few days makes the offer tempting, she shakes her head. "I have a hot date with Rebecca Catalina's whirlpool tub, followed by a clandestine rendezvous with my couch, so I'm going to have to pass."

"What is poor Roy Mustang going to do? All the good women in Central are being taken by pieces of furniture now." He turns back to the man in the hospital bed. "You better hurry before they're all gone, Roy. I hear those chaise lounges are particularly rakish."

"You're not wrong, Hughes," Riza says around a yawn. "Well, give my regards to our favorite invalid. I'm collecting the Elrics and then I'm going home."

"You deserve it, Riza," Hughes says, giving her a cartoonish thumbs-up. In a lower voice, all pretension suddenly dropped, he adds: "I can take care of Roy. Don't worry about it. Lord knows I've had enough experience keeping Roy Mustang in bed."

Sometimes she forgets that Maes Hughes, Family Man and Doting Father, is still capable of making dirty jokes. "Don't let Gracia hear you."

He shrugs. "Gracia knows. Everybody knows. Half of Central probably knows, to be fair. I can't help it that I've upgraded now--" A hospital-issue pillow hits Maes Hughes squarely in the face, knocking off his glasses. "Duty calls. Sleep well, Riza."

"You too, Maes," she says, and begins walking back to Ed's room.

 _Going home_ , she thinks.  _What a strange turn of phrase._

* * *

"I find it hilarious that everyone is so scared of you," Rebecca says, perched on the sink, cradling a bottle of cheap, Cretan shiraz. "You're a big softie under those biceps and lack of facial expressions."

Rebecca's bathroom, like the rest of her apartment, is huge and reeks of the money that Rebecca is spending on it. And Rebecca makes incredibly good money: being a weapons engineer for the Program, she is one of the most important members of their team, and her work isn't easy. Rebecca the Engineer is a funny contrast with Rebecca the Person, but somehow that makes moments like this--Riza sitting in Rebecca's massive bathtub under a screen of bubbles, drinking cheap wine out of a plastic cup--even more enjoyable.

"I must be going senile," Riza says, downing the rest of the wine. She holds the cup out to Rebecca who, like a good waitress, refills it swiftly. Rebecca isn't drinking; she said that if anyone in Central deserved to be a little bit pampered, it was Captain Riza Hawkeye, and so the wine, like the jets in the tub, are to loosen the muscles in her back and lift the heavy cloud of the last few days from her mind. When Riza is ready, Rebecca will drive her home, and, most likely, Rebecca will go to a bar to try and find her own means of coping.

"Don't give me that," Rebecca says. "We're only twenty-seven."

"Are you sure?" Riza asks lazily, swirling the wine around the plastic cup. "I feel so old sometimes."

"That's because you never have any fun," Rebecca explains sagely. "Fun keeps you young. You're too serious; it's gonna give you crow's feet."

"I'm not very good at having fun," Riza responds, taking a sip. "You know that."

Rebecca snorts. "Oh yeah, I know. It doesn't mean I'm gonna stop trying to get you out, though. You'll be thirty in a few years, and then what are you gonna do?"

Riza shrugs. "Probably the same things I do now."

"That's exactly what I mean!" Rebecca says, gesticulating a bit too wildly and allowing a bit of wine to slosh out of the bottle and onto the tile floor. She ignores it. "You act like you're already over the hill, but you can barely see the hill from here. Get out. Have some fun. Make some mistakes."

Riza sinks a bit lower into the tub, allowing the bubbles cover her shoulders and up to her chin. "I make plenty of mistakes."

Rebecca's face--which had been in a mask of playful anger--softens. "Make some fun mistakes. I know everybody--including you--thinks that you're invincible, but I do worry about you, Riza."

This chafes at Riza's mind. It's been an incredibly long time since someone has been worried about her. She thinks the last time she remembers was back when Mustang first showed up at her father's house, and she hasn't gotten any better at handling concern in the years that have followed. She is strong and self-sufficient and capable. She takes care of others, not the other way around.

"I'm fine," Riza says. 

She can tell that Rebecca isn't satisfied, but she doesn't say anything. "You know, Mustang's birthday is coming up in a few weeks. I think he talked about taking everybody out for a night on the town since he's turning thirty and it's kind of his last hurrah."

"That's not my thing. And besides, the Elrics--"

"Will be fine," Rebecca interrupts. "They're alone right now, aren't they? I'm sure they could handle one more night on their own. They're teenagers, Riza, not toddlers."

"Sometimes I wonder," Riza responds vaguely.

"And I'm sure that Olivier would appreciate having another person to keep Mustang in line," Rebecca says with a smirk. "You know how he gets. He gets some liquor in him and suddenly no one is safe."

"It's not my job to keep Mustang in line."

"Are you sure about that?"

Riza downs her wine and holds up the cup again. "If you're gonna be this annoying, I'm gonna need more wine."

Rebecca grins. "Now that's what I'm talking about."

* * *

"Don't you ever get tired of movies about robots?" Ed asks as Winry scrolls through the sci-fi selection on Netflix.

"Not really, no," Winry responds. "And besides, it's always fun to see how much they fuck up basic engineering."

Al laughs at that. "I would think you'd be more into it, brother, since you, you know, pilot a giant robot."

"Just kind of feels like taking my work home with me, is all," Ed says, and neither Winry nor Al miss the nervous way he opens and closes his automail hand.

"How about a comedy then?" Al suggests. "Something nice and stupid so brother can understand it."

"I think you're funny enough for all of us, Al."

"Do we want to watch a movie or not?" Winry asks with enough faux huffiness to pretend that nothing is wrong.

Their conversation is interrupted by the unexpected opening of a door. Standing in the doorway, looking a bit confused to see them still awake and sitting in the living room, is Riza, hair down and smelling distinctly of sugary-scented bubble bath.  

"Help us out, Riza," Winry says. "What movie should we watch?"

Riza, to her credit, manages to look less perplexed than she feels. The situation, she realizes, is not, in fact, that absurd. Winry, Al, and Ed are teenagers, and teenagers (she supposes) stay up late and watch movies together. She never did, but then again, she never really watched movies, and she never really had friends until she was barely a teenager anymore. No, the absurdity lies not in what they're doing, but the fact that they're doing it in her apartment, on her couch.

She hasn't been consciously avoiding them. It's just that the last week or so since they had arrived had been more than a little eventful, and she has had enough to deal with on her own without accommodating a gaggle of high schoolers. She hasn't been taking care of them, but they haven't needed taking care of. Ed and Al still have a small chunk of money leftover from the death of their mother, and Ed gets money through the Program. Winry also gets a small allowance from her grandmother, and so they tend to buy their own food and anything else they might need. Winry is growing into quite the chef, and she's offered to make Riza dinner before, but she has always been out whenever Winry would have the chance. They're less her responsibility than a triad of worryingly young roommates.

This is good. Riza isn't used to worrying about more than one person at a time. She had worried about her father for so long, and as soon as that responsibility had ended, it seemed like she had started worrying about Roy Mustang and never stopped. That singular worry, in and of itself, is enough to make herself feel stretched thin at times. She can't imagine how Hughes must feel all the time, with a wife and child to worry about. (Not that Gracia is a huge source of worry. The previous spring, Gracia had asked Riza to give her self-defense lessons, and now she could put Hughes's combat skills to shame.) It sounds exhausting.

But she can't help the feeling gnawing at her insides when she looks at Ed (who, despite being let out of the hospital, is still laying on the couch, head in Winry's lap and feet in Al's) that his getting hurt was at least partially her fault. The things she should have done flash through her mind like ticker-tape: she should have better prepared him for his first sortie, she should have made the simulations more accurate, she should have kept a better eye on Winry and Al, she should have changed their strategy so that Mustang wouldn't have gotten hurt and then Ed's sync rate would've been more stable...

She could stand like that forever, letting her mistakes wash over her and drag her down like some horrible, brackish tide, but the smell of Rebecca's bubble bath and the look of three blonde heads waiting expectantly for her to answer an incredibly simple question ground her.

"I'm not much of a film buff," she responds.

Winry sighs with overblown (and obviously pantomimed) exasperation. "I swear, all of you are philistines." 

It's such a simple, easy argument that Riza finds herself somewhat amazed by it. Mere hours before, Ed had been in the hospital after having been incapacitated in a fight with a homunculus, after his brother and best friend had almost been killed, and they had already slipped so easily back into silly, childish conversation. Riza's not sure she could do the same thing, but she's also not sure if she's ever felt enough like a child to act childishly. 

"I have an idea," Ed says suddenly. "How about we watch a bad movie? Everybody likes those."

Riza blinks. "Why would you want to watch a movie that you know isn't good?"

Winry and Alphonse both look mildly aghast. "Because they're amazing!" Alphonse says.

"Yeah," Winry agrees. "If a movie is bad enough, it loops back around and becomes good again."

"That doesn't make any sense," Riza says.

The three exchange wordless glances with each other, which is apparently enough for them to come to a conclusion. "Okay, pull up a chair, I know what we're watching," Ed says. 

Riza knows that, as she is an adult and this is her apartment, that there is no reason she should acquiesce to the demands of a fifteen-year-old. She would very much like, in fact, to boot them all of her couch so that she could get some sleep. But she also can't fight that guilty gnawing in her guts that she owes Ed for something, and that, bizarrely, this may be a way to start to make it up to him. 

And so she does.

* * *

"I'm telling you, there's something weird going on here and..." Maes scowls lightly across the table at Roy. "I'm sorry that my conspiracy theories aren't interesting enough for you."

Roy is holding his stupidly expensive phone and frowning down at it as if it had suddenly started broadcasting his notifications solely in old Xerxian. Maes's scowl is returned with even more fervor from Roy. "When and how did Fullmetal add me on Snapchat?"

It really is such a good thing that he is so affable and charming, Maes thinks, because then everyone is so wonderfully surprised when he turns out to be an evil genius. "When you were knocked out I took the liberty of giving him your handle."

"And what purpose does this serve?"

Maes considers it for a minute before saying "I think it's hilarious that you're in a feud with a fifteen-year-old."

"It's not a  _feud_ , he's just a petulant little--"

"In all seriousness, Roy," Maes interrupts. "I think you should cut him a little slack. This transition could hardly be easy for him. Remember when you moved to Central? You were hardly any better than he was."

"He's already doing better than me," Roy says drily. "After all, he never dated you."

"For a guy who just got out of the hospital, you're awfully saucy."

"Have to get my strength up somehow."

"So what'd he send you, anyway?"

Roy shrugs and knocks back the rest of his whiskey. "Just something stupid. You know the kid has a terrible sense of humor."

"Boy, do I ever. And a potty mouth, too. I'll have to be careful having him around Elicia. Although it would be adorable if she just started saying swear words. Imagine Gracia's face!"

Roy carefully stows his phone back into his jacket pocket. He's not sure how Ed managed it, but he had somehow caught a picture of Hawkeye, asleep in a chair, and had sent it him without a caption. He listens as closely as he can to Maes's comfortingly banal chatter, letting it wash the image from his mind.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is actually the Japanese episode title of the episode of Eva that would follow what happened in the previous chapter. I can't remember what the English title is, but for some reason I've always really liked "Unknown Ceilings."
> 
> Also, the bad movie that Riza and the Elric squad end up watching is Troll 2, which may or may not be on Netflix still. It's been too long since I've seen it, so I can't remember. Regardless, it is indeed a masterpiece and you should all go watch it right now.


	9. No tears for the creatures of the night

At his core, General King Bradley is a family man. 

"This meeting just sprang up," he says into his cell phone.

His wife, like always, sounds disappointed but understanding. "I know you're so busy, darling, but Selim got straight A's on his report card again and I'm making him a special dinner to celebrate."

"I'm terribly sorry, dear. I'll make it up to him somehow."

She sighs. "I know you will, darling. You always do."

Ah, Mrs. Bradley: long-suffering, unsuspecting, doubtless Mrs. Bradley, with her heart as soft as melting ice cream and her eyes as flat and depthless as a roadside puddle. He can't resent her, no matter how hard he tries. There is something enchanting about her boundless devotion, about her limitless trust. He allows himself to revel in playing house with her as if he were a child, as if he had ever truly been a child in the first place.

"I need to go, the meeting is about to start."

"Of course, dear. I'll give Selim your love. I love you."

"I love you too."

It's not precisely a lie, but it's not precisely a truth either.

It's as if the various members of FATHER were waiting, probably because they were. Their eyes and ears extend far, even when they aren't physically present. And they very rarely are; although Bradley functions as a kind of lynchpin for the organization in Amestris, there are members representing the other major powers of the world: Drachma, Xing, Aerugo, Creta. There is no representative from Ishval, but, then again, there is barely an Ishval left to represent. 

"Explain, Wrath," says the representative from Drachma. Sometimes he has been Bradley for so long that he forgets his real name. But he's been playing this game for almost his entire life, so it doesn't take long to slip back into character. "What happened with Lust?"

The generally empty seats around his table in the war room are now filled by holographic representations of the various members of FATHER, each cast in a color to represent them: Drachman red, Cretan orange, Aerugan green, and Xingese yellow. From where they're sitting, they can see him projected in Amestrian blue, the same hue as their military uniforms.

"I'm not sure. Everything seemed to be going according to plan, but we haven't adequately adjusted to the Elric boy. We thought his inexperience would work well for our goal, but that seems to not be the case."

"Obviously that's not the case," says the Aerugan representative. "That sortie was far too clean, Wrath."

"There are people in our media who are claiming it was staged," adds the Xingese representative. "My country is fast losing support for our endeavor."

"It won't happen again, I can assure you of that," says Bradley. 

"You're right, it won't," says the Cretan representative. "We've got our eyes on you, Wrath. The eyes of the world."

"The eyes of God," adds the Drachman representative with, Bradley notes to himself wryly, a particularly Drachman sense of drama. 

"God's in his heaven and all's right with the world," says Bradley with a bit of the dry wit that the Amestrian media always likes to remark on fondly any time he makes a speech. "That's an old adage, isn't it? From that ancient religion out West that died out."

His attempt at levity is unsuccessful. He isn't surprised. 

"We expect you to do better," says the Xingese representative. "In order for the Human Instrumentality Project to succeed, we  _need_ you to do better."

"I will," Bradley responds, and there is an oath ringing behind his words. "I can assure you of that."

* * *

Roy Mustang has been staring into his bathroom mirror for the last half hour, because what he sees simply cannot be real. The timing is too perfect: he gets his first grey hair on his thirtieth birthday? That doesn't happen in real life; it happens in movies, and generally not even good ones. 

But there it is. The offensive thing sits at his left temple, steely grey and ultimately innocuous, but offensive nonetheless. His first instinct is to pluck the damned thing out, but he's heard enough old wives' tales about how that would just make even  _more_ grey hairs sprout in its place, and he isn't prepared for that. If he had maybe another decade on his personage then he could pull off the greying, dignified look. But he's only thirty, for goodness sake (he has to really stress the "only" to himself, because for most of his life thirty has sounded dreadfully old). How is he going to continue breaking the hearts of all the young and eligible singles of Central City with grey hair?

"Happy birthday to me," he says grimly to his reflection. 

At least, for once, his birthday has fallen on a Friday and not in the middle of the week. (Not that that's ever stopped him from tying one on before.) After he gets off work, he is going out with his friends, and he is going to get uproariously drunk and find someone pretty enough to take home and help him to forget about things like grey hair and the slow encroachment of his own mortality. 

He surveys the wreck that is his apartment and changes his mind.  _He_ will be taken home then, because who cleans on their birthday? Not Roy Mustang, that's for damn sure.

But, as always seems to be the case, he's running late, and he dresses hastily, so that when Hawkeye comes to claim him he's rummaging for his things in the living room and gnawing on an apple.

"Happy birthday," she says with her standard dryness when he opens the door. She's holding a small, rectangular package wrapped in garish paper that he can't imagine her buying, with a large, metallic gold bow on top. 

He's a bit taken aback. They've never been ones for gifts. Hawkeye is the type where, if she wants something, she'll get it herself instead of waiting around for someone to get it for her, and she also doesn't believe in frivolous presents that no one will use, so she doesn't generally get anyone gifts. Seeing her holding a box covered in wrapping paper is almost hilariously incongruous. 

"Oh, wow, thanks, Hawkeye. You shouldn't have." He holds the apple between his teeth so that he can get a better grip on the wrapping paper.

"No, I think I really should have," says Hawkeye. 

Being so small, it only takes a moment for Mustang to get enough off to see the box underneath. She had bought him nicotine gum. Splendid. 

He palms the apple again and swallows uncomfortably around a large bite. "Gee, thanks, Hawkeye."

"You're welcome. Don't you think you're getting a bit too old for bad habits?"

He wants to respond with "Don't you think you're a bit young to act like everyone's mother?" but he doesn't. He can't stop Hawkeye from unintentionally mothering him any more than she can stop him from smoking, no matter how many boxes of nicotine gum she buys him.

"Who would I be without my bad habits?" He asks it as a joke, but it leaves his mouth sounding much more honest than he intended. She always does this to him, and he wonders if she notices it, the way they can't have a conversation that isn't stacked on top of itself like Drachman nesting dolls, with what they are actually needing to say to each other buried under layers of banalities. Even talking about the weather with her feels as if they're exchanging classified government secrets.

"You'd still be yourself," she says, and he knows he isn't imagining the way there is an unspoken "I promise" dangling off the end of her statement. After all, she would know. She was there for his first cigarette and his first drink (not his first time though, of course, that would be weird). She remembers firsthand when he was still an awkward, frightened teenager and not the terror of every bar in Central City. It's just so easy to hide in a cloud of cigarette smoke and bodies and bourbon.

"But we should go," she says, and their dance concludes. "It may be your birthday, but we've got work to do."

"No rest for the wicked," he says with a sigh.

Riza doesn't smile, or smirk, but there's something in the set of her eyes that makes him think she considered it. "Something like that."

While the elevator ride down from his apartment has to be the longest this side of Xing, he finds he doesn't actually mind it all that much. It's what's on the other side of the elevator that he could do without.

He can see Elric's unruly fringe from the backseat, poised upright and ready like an eager dog over a face that is grinning with wicked glee. It is his  _birthday_. He should not have to deal with whatever bullshit the Fullmetal toddler is going to throw his way.

He gets into the passenger seat of Hawkeye's car a bit more gingerly than usual, in case there's a whoopie cushion or a thumbtack in his seat. There isn't, which only makes him worry more.

"Heard it was your birthday, Mustang," he says.

"Congratulations, Elric, you may be a brat, but you're not hard of hearing."

"I had no idea you were so  _old_ , Mustang. Can I start calling you 'Grandpa'?"

"I don't know, will that mean that you'll finally start respecting your elders?"

"Maybe when they give me something to respect."

He wonders if, because it's his birthday and everything, he would be let off the hook for throttling a teenager, and doubts it.

"Maybe, just this once," Hawkeye says evenly. "We can drive to HQ and have only pleasant conversations?" Her eyes lock with Elric's--two pairs of eyes, varying shades of amber, and the resemblance is briefly uncanny--and there is no question there whether he respects  _her_ authority or not. "It is his birthday, after all."

"Fine," Elric says with a grumble. "Just this once." And then, because he can't end a conversation without having the last word: "I mean you are  _double my age now_. I wouldn't want to rattle your frail, elderly constitution."

That particular minefield successfully traversed, Hawkeye, eyes steady on the early-morning road, asks "So what are you doing to celebrate?"

"Christmas wants to see me and then we're all going to the Devil's Nest."

Riza grimaces. "The Devil's Nest? Really? That place is so grim."

"That's part of the charm, though. You don't go there to enjoy yourself."

"Then why do you go?"

The Central skyline is now awash in a peachy gold. He doesn't usually like being awake this early, but he can't deny the slight thrill it sends through his chest, even now, even after all these years. It's amazing how you can grow up in a place, can consider it home, and still be so consistently caught off-guard by it.

"Catharsis."

* * *

 "Your girl has been a godsend," Rebecca says, dabbing at the back of her neck with a grease-stained towel. Her curly brown hair is piled atop her head in a bun, but despite its subterranean status, the engineering garage at Central HQ is still boiling due to all the machines, welding equipment, and the bizarrely cramped space. Riza is sitting on a worktable, watching as her friend does  _something_ with an arsenal's worth of wrenches. Riza is good with tactics, and even with small machinery, like guns; she can tinker with her car if she has to, although that's not her preferred state of things. But the way Rebecca is so in tune with the hulking, metal Alchemists is stunning to watch. Riza wouldn't know her way around Rebecca's toolbox any more than she would know her way around the Aerugan capital city.

"She's not my girl--" Riza begins to protest, but Rebecca plows forward like a steamroller.

"She's got a real head for numbers, which is perfect. Brosh wouldn't know calculus if it bit him in the ass. I swear, who let that oaf be an engineer? If it weren't for Ross, they'd never get anything done, and I'd have to do all this work myself." Riza finds herself thinking that, even if that were the case, they would still be in good shape. Rebecca's hands may not have her calluses, since she always works in gloves and systematically gets a manicure every Saturday afternoon, but they are capable and good at what they do. Rebecca tightens a screw, sits back on her haunches to regard it briefly, and then tosses her wrench back into her toolbox before looking up at her friend. "I've gotta admit: your sudden tendency to place a startling amount of faith in children is a bit freaky, and it makes me nervous, but you've yet to be proven wrong so far."

The "so far" sits uncomfortably in Riza's gut, but she doesn't mention it. "Glad to hear it," she says instead. "And I'm sure Winry appreciates you agreeing to apprentice her like this."

"She's a stubborn kid, but so was I," Rebecca says with a grin. "They should've called  _her_ Fullmetal, I swear. She's young, and she still has a lot to learn, but she's got talent and the work ethic of a pro. She would've been wasted in automail." Rebecca holds out a hand, and Riza tosses her a water bottle, which she takes a greedy sip from. "But enough about that. Are you coming out with us tonight?"

Riza had hoped that, by talking about Winry, this wouldn't come up. But while Riza may be, ostensibly, "the Hawk's Eye," Rebecca Catalina has a case of tunnel vision that would rival any rifle sight. 

"To the Devil's Nest? Really? Mustang is thirty, not eighteen."

"Oh come  _on_ , it's fun! Revisiting old haunts, and whatnot."

"We'll be the oldest people there by a decade."

Rebecca's dark eyes are glittering. "You said 'we.'"

Riza pops a kink in her neck. "How about this: I'll go with you to Christmas's, because I haven't seen her in ages. You all can go to the Devil's Nest and have college students spill drinks on you all you want."

Rebecca pouts. "You're no fun, Riza. What am I going to do without my wingwoman?"

"Just fine, I would assume."

Rebecca considers this a moment before nodding. "Yeah, you're probably right. Even loneliness can't keep me down."

Rebecca Catalina may be an exhausting friend to have on occasion, but her happiness and confidence is infectious. It amazes her, honestly, the way tragedy rolls off of her shoulders like water off a duck's feathers. Her posture still sits just this side of impolite, and her smile is still huge and sloppy, but if her mind is troubled, or her sleep interrupted by the same horrors that crawl out of Riza's heart in the nighttime, she doesn't show it, and Riza has no way of knowing. Perhaps she just dances herself into exhaustion, and then the demons don't have the chance to claw at her dreams.

As if suddenly remembering why they're there in the first place, Rebecca regards her work again. "If you're heading back out, let Elric know that I've reinforced the hand blade in his Alchemist. He messed it up pretty bad, so I tried to make it a bit more sturdy. That doesn't mean he should go around stabbing at everything left, right, and center, but if this happens again, it shouldn't fracture quite so much."

Riza slides off the worktable, her shoes landing on the floor with a satisfying slap. "You're a genius, Becca."

"I know," she says, not missing a beat. She holds up two crossed, gloved fingers. "Here's hoping this genius gets laid tonight." 

* * *

Everyone knows that Madam Christmas runs a brothel. She's a relic of a bygone era in an age when sex workers in Central tend to work independently, finding clients over the internet. Setting up shop in a stately, nineteenth century building that used to be a hotel, there's a certain brazenness to the way that Madam Christmas so blatantly doesn't bother hiding the true nature of her business. Although, technically, the bar that occupies the ground floor of her establishment is open to all manner of customers, be they looking for a drink or something a little stronger, Roy knows that, aside from his friends, most of the other people in the bar probably won't be leaving for a while.

Although you might not be able to guess it from the sheer amount of crushed red velvet in the bar or the hideously expensive cigars that she smokes, Chris Mustang is ultimately a charitable soul. The only time she'd turned a girl away was when some self-righteous co-ed showed up wanting to get "liberated." But she employs all kinds, from runaways to illegal immigrants to women who, truly, believe Christmas's business to be the best option for them.  (And Chris Mustang pays excellently.) She sees to it that the ones who haven't been have the opportunity to get educated, and has no qualms with striking fear into the heart of any man (or woman) who decides to start any funny business under her roof. While more than a little unorthodox, Christmas was a good foster mother, and if there was one thing she drilled into Roy's head growing up, it was that it's not that women deserve respect, it's that they're  _owed_ it, because they're people. Just because the girls she employ sell sex doesn't make that any less true. Roy loves all the Madam's girls like sisters, and although he's always proud of them when they find themselves off to better things, as a child he was always sad to see them leave.

"How old are you now, Roy-boy?" Christmas asks around her cigar.

"Thirty."

She exhales her smoke dramatically. "God, you're getting old, aren't you?"

"And you're still looking lovely as ever," Roy says with the grin he used to use on the girls to bring him sweets or to not tell the Madam when he slid down the polished wooden banister of the stairs.

Christmas flicks her eyes away from her foster son to Riza. "Honestly, how do you put up with this?"

Riza shrugs, sipping from her drink. The Madam's profession aside, she's easily the best bartender in Central. "I don't really have much of a choice, Madam. My putting up with him is necessary for national security."

Christmas's laugh is booming and rusty, a warm sound that always will remind Riza of the month she and Roy had lived with her after first moving to Central, before they found an apartment. To her credit, Madam Christmas never once made any comment on her foster son's quite literally bringing a girl home. Riza supposes she's seen much stranger things in her tenure.

"You should come here more often," Christmas says, removing the cigar from between her teeth. "After Roy-boy you're a breath of fresh air."

After the grimness of the last few weeks, the jolly scene in Christmas's bar is honestly...nice. Riza wasn't lying to Rebecca when she said that going out wasn't really her thing. But she's glad her friend has at least conned her out this much. She likes Madam Christmas, and the friendly chatter floating through the air is enough to drown the white noise from her mind for a little while.

"She's been a little busy lately," Mustang says, watching as the whiskey in his glass slips over and around the single, artfully crafted spherical ice cube. Christmas may be a madam with something of an old-fashioned sensibility, but no one could say she didn't have style.

"Is that so," Christmas says, exhaling a long puff of rich-smelling smoke. Riza notes that, despite the fact that they're in a bar, Mustang isn't smoking. She wonders if Christmas knows he's picked up that habit. It's been over a decade, sure, but it's amazing the lengths people will go to in order to hide things from their parents.

"She's recently come into possession of some children," Mustang continues.

Christmas lets out a creaky chuckle. "I know how that goes. They're such a pain."

Mustang pulls a face before downing the rest of his drink. He flicks a glance over to Riza's--only her second--which is still half full. "You need to catch up, Captain. At this rate we'll never get you to the Devil's Nest."

Christmas grimaces. "You're going to leave my fine establishment and then go to that dive? I'm offended."

"They may be, but I'm not. I would hate to tarnish the good name of Madam Christmas by associating it with that," Riza says crisply.

Christmas's rosy-lipped smile is proud and devilish. "Why couldn't you have stumbled into my life instead of Roy-boy here, Riza? You've got some class."

"At least I don't have a stick up my ass," Mustang mumbles before trying awkwardly to drink the dregs at the bottom of his glass.

Though she may be known as the Hawk's Eye, Riza's ears are nothing to sneeze at either, and that particular remark does not escape her. It is probably a testament to the alcohol sitting on her stomach that she even graces that with a response. "I do  _not_ have a stick up my ass."

Madam Christmas suddenly looks very torn between wanting to eavesdrop and knowing that she shouldn't. While Mustang may be her son, he has also just turned thirty, and at this point in his life she thinks that he can dig his own grave without her watching. (And besides, she has eyes and ears all over the place. She's sure that she'll hear about it some way or other in the morning.)

"It's like ever since those Elric kids showed up you've turned into Captain Responsibility."

Riza almost laughs at that, but instead says "You sound like a whiny child."

Mustang rolls his eyes in that petulant way she hates, the one that communicates a fashionable, if childish, disdain for everything she stands for. She barely has time to register the annoyance that is beginning to roil in her stomach, mixing dangerously with the vodka, before he snips "Well, you'd know all about  _that_ wouldn't you?"

"Jean Havoc!" Christmas booms, scuttling to the other end of the bar where Havoc had not, in any way, called for her attention. "I haven't seen you in ages. How about you let Madam Christmas make you a drink." Havoc, to his credit, takes it in stride, shaking the ash from his cigarette into one of the madam's many ornate, crystal ashtrays. 

"What's going on with you?" Riza asks, dropping her voice so that it can hide stealthily under the more sanguine chatter of their friends. She can hear Havoc, who is sitting at a table with Breda and Rebecca, trying to haggle Christmas into pouring him some whiskey, but she keeps reminding him that he doesn't like whiskey, and actually quite likes cider. This means that he's trying to impress Rebecca then. She'll file that piece of knowledge away for later, when she doesn't so desperately want to pour the remains of her drink on Mustang's head. He's slicked his hair back in that stupid way he always used to do when he was trying to look grown-up, and she thinks that if she did pour her drink on his head, it would roll slickly off his hair, like rain off an umbrella. 

"Nothing's going on with me."

"This is your birthday," she reminds him. "I understand that you have a bit of leeway because of that, but you're being even more of an ass than usual."

He winces, just slightly, before casting a look around and leaning on his stool toward hers. His face is so close that she can smell the whiskey and probably half a pack of cigarettes he had smoked before coming in on his breath. "Can you keep a secret?"

Sometimes, it feels like all Riza does is keep secrets. She kept joining the military a secret from him, she kept the fact that Hughes was engaged to Gracia a secret from Mustang the entire time they were in Ishval (which she still isn't proud of), she keeps the story of the one time Rebecca drunkenly kissed her a secret from everyone (including Rebecca, who seemingly doesn't remember it), and she keeps the continually mounting fear of her own impending failure a secret from all the people who need her to succeed. She thinks she can handle one more. She just nods.

"I found a grey hair this morning."

She blinks, waiting for a follow up to this most mundane of independent clauses, but none comes.

"Is that it?"

He gawks at her. "Of course that's it!"

Upon further reflection, this makes complete sense. Roy Mustang's vanity is a force to be reckoned with, and it suddenly all slots together that a single grey hair would send him into some kind of bitchy tailspin. It doesn't make his behavior excusable (not even close), but it at least makes it make sense. 

"You are thirty," she says matter-of-factly. 

"Thanks for reminding me," he says, setting his glass down on the bar. "So that's why I'm doing this," he says, gesturing to all their friends gathered in his foster mother's bar-cum-bordello. "And that's why we're going to the Devil's Nest after. I just..." He shifts his gaze to Christmas's wall of hideously expensive liquors, as if suddenly unable to meet her eyes. "I feel old, Hawkeye. For the first time ever, I feel  _old_. Is it that silly to want to retrace my steps a little bit? Do all the stupid stuff I did when I was young?"

She wants to tell her friend that, in fact, he isn't old. Thirty, in this day and age, is still practically the prime of life. And while his myriad bad habits may serve to curb this somewhat, he is remarkably physically fit, and could, by some stroke of dumb luck, live to see a ripe old age. He has only just cleared his twenties, and already he thinks that he's over the hill. She wants to say these things to him, but knows that would make her a hypocrite, and there is nothing she would hate more than that. She had practically this exact conversation with Rebecca, and had been fed the same advice that she would like to feed to Mustang, but she can't. While she might not feel it in years, she feels the ache of experience settling in her joints, and it aches more every year. 

"I just don't understand why that has to include the Devil's Nest."

Mustang chuckles, unsticking his eyes from the wall of glimmering bottles. "Do you remember what you used to say about it, Hawkeye? Back when we were at Central U together?" 

Truthfully, no. Hawkeye saw her time at Central University as a purely pragmatic thing, a means to an end that involved her keeping her eye on Mustang and figuring out a way to destroy the homunculus that killed her mother, the one she is still sure is sleeping somewhere in the arctic sea. (She keeps this a secret too. She spent too much of her childhood being told she was a silly little girl making up stories to disclose that particular motivation.) Her time there included almost none of the gallivanting that Mustang got up to, except for the few times he managed to drag her along. She went to the Devil's Nest a total of three times, and, as far as she was concerned, that was more than enough.

"No, I don't."

His smile turns wry, and then wistful, as if none of what he is seeing is truly there, only pictures in a yearbook. "'The Devil's Nest,'" he quotes, "'is where you go when you hate yourself.'"

* * *

Ed doesn't believe in hypnosis. It's just not a concept that makes sense to him. He understands that people are easily manipulated, but tapping into some subconscious part of their brain to convince them to stop smoking or dance like a chicken just seems stupid to him, much like fortune telling, astrology, and organized religion (or disorganized religion, for that matter). That being said, he's been staring up at the slowly rotating ceiling fan in the room he shares with Al for at least an hour, maybe more. He, Winry, and Al had ordered a pizza earlier, and Al had eaten so much he had lulled himself into a food coma on the living room couch. In order to avoid bothering him (goodness knows he needs his sleep), Ed packed up his laptop and moved it into his room. But, since closing the door, he hadn't opened it, and instead has been watching the thin blades of wood as they made their sleepy circle on his ceiling. _  
_

He's not sure what hypnosis involves, and he's definitely certain he would still slap someone in the face (with his automail hand, too) if they tried to make him do something stupid, but he does feel oddly calm. It's like someone took one of those spouts you put on lemonade pitchers and attached it to his head, draining every thought out and onto the floor. It's soothing.

They haven't talked about it (and, in fact, go to incredibly great lengths to  _not_ talk about it), but Ed hasn't been 100% there since the sortie with Lust. The fear of almost losing Al and Winry, not to mention the fear of being absolutely certain that he had just watched Roy Mustang die, aside, he feels like he might have accidentally left a piece of himself in the Alchemist. Not a big piece, but a piece big enough to notice its absence. He's slower to joke now, and finds it harder to sleep. (If you had told Alphonse that, at a point in his life,  _Edward Elric,_ self-proclaimed King of the Nap Game, would find it difficult to sleep, he would have laughed. He doesn't laugh at the thought now.) Syncing with the Alchemist had never been an issue for him, not for Edward Elric, child prodigy. He's good at most things, and piloting is no exception. But his memories of the sortie with Lust are hazy, dreamlike. He remembers a searing anger, white-hot and unlike anything he had ever experienced, not even when Gluttony was destroying his home and his mother and his body. But, after marching through the red mist, he only remembers waking up in St. Lilith, Central's military hospital. He had a splitting headache and was stiff from sleeping for more than a day, but other than that, he was fine.

He asked Mustang about it, in one of their few, very brief private conversations. They had been driving to HQ for the first time after the sortie, and in a moment of remarkable shortsightedness, Hawkeye had forgotten to stop for gas during her frequent trips to and from the hospital. She pulled over to a brightly-colored roadside gas station, and as she was pumping the gas, Ed allowed his normal ribbing of Mustang to stop. 

"Hey, Mustang?" he ventured from the backseat.

"What?" he responded, none of either the slick chatter he exchanged with Hawkeye or the much-put-upon annoyance he reserved for Ed. He'd rolled down the window a sliver and was trying to surreptitiously light a cigarette without alerting Hawkeye. Of course, she noticed, and made a face like she was sucking on a lime wedge, but she didn't say anything.

"Do you feel...I don't know..." In the muggy, early-morning heat of Central, with the cicadas just beginning to scream at the sun, Ed's neck prickled uncomfortably against his braid. He never liked admitting weakness, or even discomfort, let alone to Mustang, of all people. "Different?"

"Different how?" Mustang asked, exhaling the smoke carefully outside the window. Mustang is, at least, a conscientious smoker. Ed has seen him thwack Havoc upside the head for the way he blows smoke in Fuery's face to annoy him, rattling off a list of facts about secondhand smoke. Ed hasn't yet been able to unravel Mustang's compassion, as occasionally it presents itself to be something like a Rubix cube. Every now and then, you think you're on the verge of cracking the code, and then you've left one square unaligned. He knows it's there, though. Otherwise he doubts he would have earned Hawkeye's trust the way he has.

"Weird," Ed attempted. "Like sort of...I don't know, drained. Out of it."

"Are you having trouble sleeping?" Mustang didn't turn around in his seat or even catch Ed's eyes in the rearview, which Ed appreciated. Ed isn't used to even suspecting that people are as smart as him. He is used to being the smartest person in every room, generally regardless of what the room is. But while they may usually be occupied in rolling bitchily or floating off in space somewhere, Mustang's eyes are dark and intelligent, and it sets Ed's nerves on edge. He doesn't like not being able to bluff his way out of things.

"Yeah," Ed said with a bit of surprise.

Mustang nodded and then leaned his head back onto the headrest of his seat. He exhaled smoke into a neat ring that collided with the roof of the car before dissipating into the air. "It's not something you ever really get used to."

Anxiety began to pool in Ed's belly, the feeling that, perhaps, he had bitten off more than he could chew here. Hawkeye had spoken at length about how well prepared they were for everything, about how they were a pair of strong hands holding up the crumbling pillars of the earth, and he had always believed her. Hawkeye spoke with such quiet conviction that you never wanted to not believe her. His mom had always spoken that way. But Mustang had two ways of speaking: the first as if he were declaiming some political candidacy speech (which Ed hated), and the second as if he were letting you in on a secret that he wished he didn't have to tell you. This was the second, and Ed found a bizarre amount of comfort in this rare display of honesty.

And then, perhaps, most surprising of all, Ed heard Roy Mustang say something he never expected would cross his lips: "I'm sorry."

The spell was broken quickly, however, as Ed heard the thunk of the gas nozzle being replaced. Calmly and silently, Hawkeye moved to the passenger side of the car and stood facing Mustang. She made no movement, not even in her face, but--in one of their freaky displays of telepathy--Mustang seemed to know what she wanted. With no protestation, he rolled down the window and handed the cigarette to Hawkeye, who crushed it under her boot. And then, as if the whole exchange had never happened, she got back into the driver's seat and drove them all to work.

Ed jumps a bit at a series of quiet knocks at the door. Pushing the shakiness from his limbs, he opens the door to see Winry standing in the doorway in her cover-alls, unzipped to the waist, and a sports bra. It's a little odd to see her looking like that here, since it's a sight that smacks so strongly of Resembool. He hadn't even known that she'd brought her cover-alls.

"Could you help me out with something?" she asks.

"Uh, sure," he says. "What is it?"

"I'm building a bed."

"You're what?"

By way of explanation she leads him to the room formerly known as Riza's, where a pile of scrap metal is laid out on an old sheet on the floor.

"That's supposed to be a bed?" Ed asks warily.

"It will be, eventually," Winry responds with all the sureness of someone who knows what they're doing. "I got Maria and Denny from engineering to help me sneak it out. I think Rebecca knows I'm doing it, but she hasn't said anything."

"And why are you building a bed out of scrap metal?" 

"It just seems silly that I get this big nice bed while Riza--the woman who is taking care of us and letting us live in her home--has to sleep on the couch. It's not right." Her hands are balled into fists inside of their gloves and perched on her hips. (Ed tries not to think about her hips.) "Not that I want to sleep on the couch either, so I thought, 'How hard could it possibly be to make a bed?'"

"You couldn't have gone to Ikea?" Ed asks, surveying the sincerely uncomfy looking pieces of metal on the floor.

"Why would I buy what I could make for free?" Winry responds as if it's the simplest thing in the world to steal material from military organizations and use it to build furniture. "I need some help though, if you wouldn't mind lending a hand."

"Shouldn't you be asking Al for help? He's the one who's doing engineering. I went for chemistry."

Winry shrugs, and Ed can see a smattering of new freckles on her shoulders. "You seem capable enough. Plus, Al's sleeping. I don't want to wake him."

Ed can't argue with that. He plops down unceremoniously onto the floor and Winry smiles, pleased at her powers of persuasion. It's hot in Riza's little room, and Black Hayate is snoozing thickly on the bed, lulled by the continual breeze of the ceiling fan turned on full force.

Winry is precise and, while not a born teacher, is informed enough about what she is doing that Ed can use his own powers of deduction to work on their project. It's funny; almost half of Ed's body is machinery, and his job is operating what might be one of the heaviest pieces of machinery in the world, but he doesn't know much about it. He has no head for gears.

They're unusually silent, and he isn't sure if it's due to the time of night (the clock is slowly creeping toward eleven, and Riza told them before not to expect to see her that night before they all went to bed) or to Ed's odd state of mind. Normally there is never any shortage of conversation between him and Winry. They've known each other their whole lives, and that's no exaggeration. Ed can't remember a time when Winry wasn't in his life in some form or fashion and they've always chatted and joked and argued with ease.

"I don't think I've ever thanked you," Winry says, turning a bolt with a wrench on a pipe that Ed is holding down for her. "I don't think anyone has ever thanked you, actually."

"Thanked me for what?" Ed asks, and Winry lets out a soft chuckle. He doesn't realize that the laugh was sad until she looks up at him are her blue eyes are strained.

"You have to ask? Really?" 

Ed blinks. "Am I missing something here?"

Winry sighs and scratches her head with the wrench. "God, Ed. You saved our lives! Not just mine and Al's, but everyone's. The whole city, maybe the whole world! I don't know, this is your thing, not mine." Funny, Ed was thinking exactly the same thing about this bizarre little project. "But you put your life on the line. You could have died. And you did it. You still do it, even after what happened, and somebody should thank you, so..." Her eyes on his are heavy and blue and he feels himself going a bit dizzy, like looking directly up at the sky on a cloudless day and not being able to find your bearings. "Thank you."

It's just two commonplace words. They're words that people tend to say a lot, for casual things, like a waiter refilling your drink, or someone complimenting your shoes. They shouldn't sound this heavy and meaningful, especially not from Winry, of all people, who willingly spends her free time reading automail journals and still yells at him for not drinking his milk. Winry was just a weird little gear head for so long, but the way she said "Thank you" made her sound like an adult. Like a woman.

Ed can feel his ears going red, and he doesn't think he can blame the heat anymore.

* * *

The Devil's Nest is in the part of the city surrounding Central U, an area populated mainly by college students, party kids, and low-income families. It is not what one would call "a nice area of town," but neither Roy nor Riza cared much when they lived in that neighborhood while they were in university. Well, Riza didn't mind it. Roy  _loved_ it. It had everything he could want: bars with blurry-eyed bouncers who never looked too hard at his fake ID, clubs where good bands played, and plenty of people who were more than willing to show him what he had missed in the year he had been gone in the middle of bum fuck nowhere.

The Devil's Nest gained its seedy reputation for a couple reasons. The first is that it has free entry, which means that everyone filters through it at some point or other. The second is that it is one of the few clubs in the city that lets people in at eighteen, drawing perfunctory X's on the back of the hands of those under twenty-one that are easily dissolved with the hand sanitizer in the bathrooms. It was already a locus of poor decision making by the time Roy made it back to Central after his time out West with the Hawkeyes, but then he could finally partake.

Like many establishments in the university area of Central City, the Devil's Nest is, actually, underground, and you have to descend a slippery stairwell lit by bright red florescent lights that hum ominously as you descend to what looks like the pits of hell. (If you asked Riza, that analogy isn't too far off.) Inside there are two dance-floors, the bigger of which plays Top 40 (Roy's favorite), and the smaller of which (barely more than a closet) plays loud punk music. Between the two is one tiny bar, always staffed by surly bartenders who look as if they would rather be anywhere else, and mix all their drinks in plastic tumblers so that the revelers who would inevitably drop them wouldn't have to worry about getting sliced by broken glass.

The two most common adjectives used by people who have been to the Devil's Nest are "grim" and "sticky."

Roy loves it.

Their party has thinned out somewhat by this point. Hughes has a family to get back to ("Now isn't that convenient," Roy had joked, but Hughes had only shrugged. "Maybe if you got one yourself you wouldn't feel the need to do shit like this."), Fuery and Falman don't have the constitution for it, and Olivier decided to find entertainment elsewhere when it became abundantly clear that both of her drinking buddies were otherwise occupied. 

The bouncer--a huge, solid man who looks like a cross between a rugby player and a bull--gives Roy a funny look when he checks over his ID (Roy sincerely doubts they get many thirty-year-olds at the Devil's Nest), but he and the rest of his birthday party begin their descent.

He isn't sure who started the rumor that the Devil's Nest was built in a repurposed nuclear fallout bunker, but it doesn't seem entirely wrong. The walls are bare, thick cement, and the stairway is so long that none of the music escapes into the street. The only way to tell the Devil's Nest is even there is the one small sign hanging above the door and the queue of drunk university students that is always almost wrapped around the block.

"Do people honestly want to get in here that badly?" Riza had asked as they spied the line.

"Astoundingly," Rebecca said behind her. "Yes."

Havoc has been stuck to Rebecca like glue all night, which, Riza will be honest, is not something she had ever expected. They had never interacted much, since the engineers generally kept to themselves and Havoc was always in the main observation deck with Riza and the pilots. But, ultimately, it's none of Riza's business. Havoc is an amazingly good guy, and if Rebecca does have to bring someone home, she's glad that it might be him. She deserves to have some fun.

She almost trips on one of the slippery, steep stairs, but Breda catches her by the arm.

"You okay there, Captain?" he asks.

"Yeah," she says, righting herself.  _Pathetic_ , she thinks.  _I can't even walk down a flight of stairs, but Rebecca is wearing fuck-me heels and she seems to be doing just fine_. She isn't built for this. She's never been good at having fun. She's not even sure why she came, but something about Mustang's comment about her having a stick up her ass has irked her more than she realized. Maybe Rebecca is right and she deserves to have some fun and not be "Captain Responsibility" all the time. Not that this is exactly her idea of fun, but what if it were? Maybe if she tries hard enough, drinks enough, she can learn how to enjoy herself. "Just had a little more to drink than I realized."

Breda laughs his hearty laugh and pats her on the back. "Then you're ready for the Devil's Nest, I reckon."

The thing is, she isn't. It's been so long since she has been dragged down here that she forgot the sheer claustrophobia of it, the noise, the strange bouquet of sweat and booze and something tangy that might be vomit. It looks a bit like a nightmare, honestly. The lights and the noise and the people and--

There's a hand on her arm, and she looks up to see Mustang. The blue and green lights from the dance floor make his pale skin look ghostly, and Riza can see new shadows under his eyes. Maybe not new. Maybe just darker.

"You okay?"

The noise doesn't dim just because of a hand on her arm, but she can at least orient herself within it. She looks past Mustang to where Rebecca and Havoc are dancing sloppily on the main floor, Rebecca tossing back her dark avalanche of hair and laughing. Breda has scuttled off to the bar, and she can see him cursing upon seeing the swarm of college kids who are much more aggressively vying for drinks, carefully hiding their left hands in their pockets in case they still look gray from the remains of the X's they scrubbed off. This isn't nearly as bad as when she was still a teenager, a girl who had never been to any city other than East or West to visit her grandparents, and who had certainly never been to a club. Roy Mustang bought her her first drink when she was seventeen and he was nineteen, in this very club. It wasn't a good memory, but it wasn't a bad one either.

"Yeah, I'm fine. I think I need a drink."

Mustang's grin is blinding under the black lights, teeth straight and white as a military cemetery. "That's what I like to hear. Come on."

The Devil's Nest is a bit like the Central Zoo on a preschool field trip, in that holding hands is necessary in order to keep from being separated from your party. Mustang's hands are clammy as he pulls her through the throng and then bumps his shoulder hard against Breda's when they get to the bar, causing him to spill a bit of his whiskey and cola onto the sticky floor.

"What'd you do that for?" Breda grouches.

Mustang just laughs, a low, warm sound like a cello, before sidling up to the bar, all hip and swagger and grin. She hopes he can keep a lid on  _that_ tonight, because she's certain they're the oldest people there and she doesn't want any college students swooning over Mustang. He may have a baby face, but he also has a grey hair now. A singular grey hair, but still.

When Mustang returns from the bar, he has two of the Devil's Nest's clunky plastic tumblers full of something fizzy, each with a tiny shot glass suspended in the liquid.

"Those look like a bad idea," Riza says.

"Oh, they're terrible. But I don't think we're drunk enough for this, do you?" Riza would say that, for herself at least, he wouldn't be wrong. But even with his eyes so dark, Riza can tell that his pupils are blown wide, and he's wearing a smile easier than she's seen him wear in weeks, maybe months. He's moving like some kind of jungle cat, supple muscles and fine bones, and she can see a couple girls with glittery eyeshadow and large earrings watching him hungrily from against a wall.

But, all of these things considered, she isn't strong enough to be in the Devil's Nest mostly sober, so she takes the sticky plastic cup from Mustang, who raises his up into the murky green-blue lights.

"What should we toast to?" he asks.

"Mortality."

He pulls a face. "God, you're bleak. How about..." She can see his throat work as he swallows around something. Not his drink, he hasn't touched that, but there is something there, something he isn't saying. "How about to us? You're my oldest friend, Riza Hawkeye. I think that's worthy of a toast."

Mustang isn't one for sentimentality. He isn't quite as bad as she is in that area, but sentimentality requires a bit too much back-looking for someone like him. He is someone who likes to live firmly in the now, and despite his intelligence, he is not one who likes to vivisect every interaction. This is...odd. Everything about this is odd. Something about him is off, and she can't place her finger on it. It isn't his bizarre behavior from earlier, or the grey hair, or even the alcohol. But he is looking at her with wide, expectant, sparkling eyes, and she can't just leave her drink untouched.

"To me," she says drily, tipping her drink and her head back, allowing the cloying liquid (which tastes somewhere between an energy drink and cough syrup) to slip down her throat like a good lie.

Mustang's grin softens, his eyes crinkling at the edges, showing a bit of his age. "To you, indeed," and he does the same. After he is satisfied with the amount of alcohol now in their bloodstreams, he places both their cups on the bar and grabs Riza's hand again, pulling her back onto the dance floor.

They can't find Rebecca or Havoc, which is unsurprising. Even if they were on the main floor (which is doubtful; if Riza knows Havoc then he has probably dragged Rebecca onto the punk dance floor, which Rebecca will soon tire of, and then they'll probably leave), trying to find them amidst the sea of moving bodies, the lights, and the music so loud that screaming would be pointless, so that finding them would be nigh impossible. They find a small niche off to one side and Riza begins to move awkwardly from foot to foot, like a middle-schooler at a dance. She doesn't recognize any of these songs, but Mustang knows all of them, and even above the noise she can hear him singing along.

One song fades out and she's still not dancing. He shakes his head, as if looking at a silly child. When the next song comes on he stops for a moment, considering, before launching into an elaborate and dramatic performance, complete with show choir hands and deliberately poor dance moves. A few of the hip kids around him shoot him funny looks but, before Riza can stop it, a laugh begins to bubble in her belly before escaping from her lips. 

As if he hadn't expected this plan to work, Mustang stops in the middle of what he was doing to smile hugely, looking at least ten years younger than he really is. He places his hands on her hips and sways them for her and she laughs more. And now it's like the alcohol hits her all at once and she can't stop laughing. They must look absurd to everyone around them, two people who probably look like parent chaperones breaking up their child's high school dance, laughing wildly, seemingly over nothing, in the middle of the dance floor.

Riza is no dancer, and she knows that. Her maternal grandparents, in their East City decorum, had tried to teach her ballroom dancing on one of her summers there, had even hired an expensive dance instructor, but she never had the build for it. She has always been too solid, and the dance instructor said something about her shoulders not being right. She finds all of this especially hilarious in hindsight, as her first rifle instructor said she had the perfect shoulders for shooting. Mustang, surprising to literally no one, is a fabulous dancer, having been taught for years by various sisters. Whether on the ballroom or in the club, Roy Mustang can out-dance just about anyone, and here he is, guiding her hips for her so that she can perform some simulacrum of good dancing, and the laughter keeps spinning around her mouth like bells.

It doesn't hit her until that song segues into a different one and Mustang, still holding her hips, leans his forehead down to touch hers that she's happy. It's an odd realization, and one that shouldn't be as shocking as it is. Because the happiness isn't the surprise, the surprise is that she  _hasn't_ been happy for what feels like a very, very long time, but, for some reason, in the middle of the Devil's Nest, with Roy Mustang's forehead touching hers, she is happy. And, best of all, because of the alcohol washing through her mind, she doesn't even need to stop and think about why this is the case. She just stands and lets it fall gently upon her head like snow.

And then, all at once, it's gone: the hands on her hips, the forehead on hers, the happiness, quick as a camera flash. When she opens her eyes again, he's gone, as if he were a dream or a ghost. The anxiety is back now, bubbling like a tea kettle in her belly as she scans the crowd looking for that head of stupidly slicked back black hair, but she can't.

She runs back to the bar to see if Breda is there, but he isn't, and Rebecca and Havoc are still nowhere to be found. Frantic, she scrambles to the cloakroom and gets her bag, pulling out her phone to see if she has a text from anyone, but she doesn't. As a last resort she climbs up the hellish stairs of the Devil's Nest and out into the night.

It takes her eyes a moment to adjust to lights that aren't artificial colors, but once they have, she sees him standing by the curb, shakily smoking a cigarette, a fat full moon hanging lazily over his head.

She exhales, shaken, and walks toward him. "You should have told me that you were going outside."

He laughs quietly. "Yeah, sorry. I didn't know I was getting sick, otherwise I would've told you."

"You got sick?" She knows she probably sounds disapproving, but in reality she's worried. Roy Mustang has the alcohol tolerance of a pachyderm, this isn't like him.

He laughs again. "Yeah, I probably shouldn't have taken that."

 _Oh no_. "Taken what?" She always thought that Mustang's hedonism had its limits: drinking, sex, sure, maybe even weed every now and again, but nothing crazier than that. He doesn't answer, tilting his head up to look at the moon.

"Isn't the moon beautiful tonight, Hawkeye? It's like the eye of God is watching us." She wants to remind him that he's an atheist, but that isn't the issue at hand here.

" _What did you take?_ "

He waves her question away like a mosquito. "It's nothing to worry about. Just a pill. Nothing scary."

 _Well, that explains why he's been acting so weird all night_. She places her hand on his arm, just as he had on hers. "Alright, we're going home."

He blinks quickly looking at her, as if she were a particularly bright light. "What? Why?"

She leans in close to him so that the oxen-faced bouncer can't overhear them. "Because you're  _high_ , Mustang, and you were sick, and--" _  
_

"Half the people here are high, Hawkeye!" he shouts, and a few teenager shout "Whoo!" in response, laughing as they show the doorman their fake ID's.

"They're also kids, Roy." She catches her tongue between her teeth. She must really be drunk. "We're not kids anymore."

His eyes, which had been glittering earlier, are now very old and very sad. "I know we're not."

"Let's go home, okay?" He nods and allows her to call a cab.

It goes unsaid that they're going to his apartment, and it goes unsaid that she's coming with him. She has an explanation prepared for if he asks, which is that she wants to make sure he doesn't accidentally choke on his vomit and die, but he doesn't ask.

By the time they get out of the city center and to his apartment (a long, expensive cab ride, but it can't be helped), he had practically fallen asleep, and he leans heavily on her as they ride up all forty-seven floors. He doesn't bother to change out of his clothes, but he does manage to shuck off his shoes before falling into bed. Riza pours two glasses of water and manages to find a sleeve of saltine crackers that are probably as old as Alphonse Elric, but she brings them and sets them on Mustang's bedside table anyway.

She sits gingerly on the other side of the bed from him, removing her own shoes. "How are you feeling?"

"Drunk," he mumbles into his pillow. "High. Tired."

"Do you still feel sick?"

"No."

"That's good." She takes out her earrings, the same pair of simple studs she wears every day, and places them on the other night stand in what seems to be a fairly clean ash tray before laying her own head down on a pillow.

They've shared a bed before, and it's never been awkward. Their innate comfort with each other keeps that from being possible. But every time there is always that teenage worry of where to put your hands and how to lay your legs that, Riza imagines, never quite goes away, even if you share a bed with someone every night.

Riza, upon being satisfied that Mustang is not, in fact, dying (but will probably feel like dying in the morning), reaches over and turns off the light.

They lay in silence for several minutes, and Riza is on the verge of sleep when she hears something unexpected: her name.

"Riza?"

Things always get fuzzy in the dark. In the light of day it's easy to see things the way they really are, or at least the way they're supposed to be. But in the dark it always feels like a sleepover, at that strange point in the middle of the night when you're both awake and feel an inexplicable need to bare your souls. The dark does that to people, and that's why it's dangerous. It makes people honest.

And so she responds: "Yeah, Roy?"

Roy's voice is thick with all manner of things that dull the mind and good sense: alcohol, drugs, fatigue. "Could you..."

They've done this enough times that he doesn't have to finish his question and she doesn't have to ask him to.

"Yeah."

Roy wriggles over and lays his head on her chest. He is absolutely getting his hair goo on her shirt, but she finds it hard to care right now. Despite the heat (Roy's apartment always feels like a reptile exhibit) he's shivering, and she holds him tighter.

"I'm scared, Riza," he says, and his voice is thick with something different now. He sounds on the verge of tears.

"Of what?"

"Everything."

It's such a simple answer, and yet she finds that it explains exactly how she feels. It always feels like the world is on the verge of collapse, as if every roof is about to cave in, every door be beaten down, every loved one be hurt, every plan be a failure. Despite what General Bradley says to the contrary, it  _does_ feel like the end of the world. She thought she was the only one.

She rests a hand lightly on the back of his neck. "Me too."

In the morning, things will go back to the way they were. Riza will drive back to her apartment and once again, despite her chagrin, become Captain Responsibility, because that is who she needs to be, whether she likes it or not. Roy will go back to being his typical  _bon vivant_ self, and will likely go out tomorrow night as well. But for now they are just two scared grown-ups, holding onto each other as the walls close in around them and the shadows grow teeth. Only Hawkeye and Mustang have to suffer nightmares alone. Riza and Roy can whether them together, for now at least.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is from this art piece I found on Tumblr: http://36.media.tumblr.com/e55b193d42adc9dd34d8a53a5cb4f0da/tumblr_nispg1Rsj21sulnzno1_500.jpg
> 
> I am terribly, terribly sorry for how long this update took. I'm actually a little bit embarrassed to check and see when the last update was posted, so I'm just gonna say that it's been too long. But I am officially done with uni for the summer and am back in the states, so hopefully (fingers crossed) updates will get a little more consistent. In order to make up for the delay, this chapter is a bit (a lot) longer and, while not exactly action packed, has some things that hopefully you guys will enjoy.
> 
> Edit: I've given this a lot of thought, and I have actually decided that Roy would be dancing to Hotline Bling at the club with Riza, both because I have never heard Fall Out Boy in a club, and also because Roy would love Hotline Bling #confirmed. Apologies to anyone who was super attached to Roy dancing to Fall Out Boy. He would still be pop punk trash though.


	10. "In case I never make it through to where you are."

Maes Hughes is the kind of friend you go to brunch with. It fits him so well, almost as if he were born for the sole purpose of inviting people out to eat the strange middle sibling of breakfast and lunch with him and his (occasionally annoyingly) perfect family. All the places that serve brunch have breezy patios situated under fancy awnings, and brightly-lit, cheerfully-colored interiors. The tablecloths are always a perfect, summery white, the kind that reflects sunshine back at you. They're the sort of places that Roy often went with his sisters when they got the urge to dote on him (which was often), and are, in actuality, pretty girly places. Brunch is a pretty girly meal, if Roy were being honest, but Maes Hughes is the kind of man who is so comfortably situated in his own masculinity that there are few things in this world that could flap it. Hell, if a fairly serious relationship with a man couldn't do it, then Roy seriously doubts that a basket of beignets, which hilariously make little Elicia look as if she's been snorting cocaine, could put a dent into it.

Roy also likes brunch, because it's the only way you can drink before noon and not have to call yourself an alcoholic.

He had slipped out a few hours before, as he is sure Hawkeye expected him to do. He isn't sure, actually, what they would have done if he had stayed, if he wasn't able to brush aside the frankly terrifying reality of "waking up next to Hawkeye" and replace it with the much more manageable "I have a really terrible hangover and, fuck, I'm supposed to meet Maes for brunch in two hours." And so he had slipped out of bed (or  _off_ of bed, as the case may be, because he was too far gone to even get under the covers) and out of Hawkeye's arms, always surprisingly strong and muscular, and into the shower as quickly and quietly as possible. He spent most of his shower sitting down as the water drilled onto his back, because standing up made his stomach pitch, and he at least has his life together enough to not vomit in his own shower. After feeling mostly clean, he managed to slip into a pair of (he's fairly sure) clean jeans and a button-up shirt. He feels fragile in the same way hangovers make everyone feel fragile, and for some reason having his forearms exposed feels oddly risqué when he remembers that Maes's three-year-old daughter will be there. Everything he does feels risqué when he remembers that Maes--the first, and perhaps last, great love of his life, the only person he can remember saying he loved with any seriousness, who shrugged him off like an ill-fitting sweater too long ago for Roy to still be this hung up about it--has a three-year-old daughter. Because, honestly, what the fuck?

He has the music in his headphones on a little softer than usual on his walk to the Tunnel station, to account for the headache, and feels supremely blessed by the unspoken public transit etiquette that you don't make eye contact with strangers on the subway. Even after having showered, when he catches his own reflection in the window of the subway, he still looks a bit green, and the wrinkles that are beginning to etch into his forehead look much deeper. If he focuses hard enough, he can convince himself that he can see his lone grey hair, but that kind of focus makes his head hurt worse, and so he closes his eyes.

To his credit, he only shows up at the restaurant fifteen minutes late, instead of the usual thirty-to-forty-five. The Hughes family is seated on the patio--a cool breeze is sweeping in from the West and would make the day remarkably pleasant if Roy wasn't contemplating vomiting every time he passes a trashcan--looking as portrait-perfect as ever, practically a life insurance ad made flesh. Elicia is seated on Gracia's lap even though she is a "big girl who can sit in her own seat." She is joyously eating from a little bowl of cantaloupe that was probably intended for Gracia but has since been commandeered by the imperious three-year-old. That must come from Gracia, because Maes is a pushover and always has been. It made it all the worse when Roy consistently, almost compulsively, hurt him, again and again, like Riza shoots down clay pigeons.

"The birthday boy has arrived!" Maes says brightly, pulling out Roy's chair for him. He sinks onto the wicker with a little too much weight to be comfortable, but his limbs feel both brittle and jellyfish-like and he finds he doesn't really care so long as a member of the waitstaff shows up soon so that he can order a Bloody Mary.

"Welcome to the world of real adults, Roy," Gracia says with a chuckle. Gracia and Maes are the same age, and have known each other for longer than he and Roy have. It's a sweet story, really: two childhood friends, separated by shuffle of daily life, only to be brought together and apart and together again by the tragedies of war. Sweet, the sort of thing that would make a good movie. It makes the back of Roy's mouth taste sour, and he begins gulping down the glass of water (which has lemon slices and sprigs of mint in it, to clear up any misconceptions anyone had on whether this was a Nice Restaurant or not) that someone had politely already set down for him.

Roy has never been able to suss out Gracia's opinion of him. Of course, if he asks Maes, then he always says that Gracia _loves_ him, and Elicia  _loves_ him (he is "Uncle Roy," after all), and even though he knows that it's been six years (good  _lord_ , he feels old), he imagines it must be awkward knowing that your husband's best friend used to be his boyfriend. That has to be weird. But every time he sees her, Roy always thinks that Gracia Hughes would make a fantastic poker player, or maybe a spy; her face and her demeanor are always perfectly unreadable, pleasant and non-threatening and everything that Roy wasn't and could never be. Gracia is an astoundingly safe, dependable woman, and Maes deserves that, he really does.

"The world of real adults is really bright, don't you think?" Roy asks, adjusting his sunglasses.

Gracia's expression doesn't change (Roy swears, that woman could have a bomb strapped to her chest under her sensible sundress and you wouldn't fucking know), but Maes's brow knits itself in paternal concern. _You can't condescend to me if we've fucked, that's not how this works._

"Have a little too much fun at the Devil's Nest last night?"

Like Maes, Gracia had grown up in West City, but had moved out to Central for university, and so that name struck as much fear in her plush, motherly heart as it did in anyone else past college age in town.

"The Devil's Nest? Re--"

"Yes, the Devil's Nest, really," Roy snaps before he can stop himself. Both Gracia and Maes look a bit taken aback by his interruption.

Elicia crosses her chubby arms in a self-righteous pout. "It's not nice to interrupt people, Uncle Roy."

Somehow actually _hearing_ Elicia call him "Uncle Roy," as opposed to her parents simply telling her to do so, causes his stomach to seize.

"You're right, Elicia," he says, allowing the nausea to rock his stomach, like standing on a poorly-tethered dock. He lifts his eyes to Gracia's. "I'm sorry, it's just been..." He tries to think of a singular adjective, maybe even two, that could explain what had transpired the previous night. There was _stupid--_ _Seriously, Roy, you're thirty, you have no excuse to buy ecstasy off of kids in club bathrooms anymore_.--and  _surreal_ \--falling into bed, quite literally and with no implications beyond this, with Hawkeye--and scary--he's fairly sure he cried. He's never been the kind of person people have never seen cry. He's a very emotional man, particularly when under the influence of various substances, but he had been childish and silly and if he were not absolutely certain to the contrary, he would think that Hawkeye would never be able to respect him again after that. She's seen him in worse states than that, and so if she were going to drop him due to poor conduct, she would have done it by now.

But none of this he wishes to discuss with the Hugheses, all freshly-pressed and appropriately-attired for their brunch that will probably consist of fruit and yogurt and other healthy things that adults eat, and perhaps, if they were feeling frisky, a singular, overpriced mimosa. All Roy wants is the hugest, greasiest omelette he can procure, which here will probably still include goat's cheese and heirloom tomatoes.  "It's been a very long few days."

Gracia looks at him as if he were her erstwhile younger brother, or maybe an underfed puppy in the window of a pet shop. He doesn't like being pitied. He takes his sadnesses and anxieties and he handles them himself. Does he do so in a healthy manner? No. But does he handle them? Yes, and that is more than a lot of people can say.

"Which is why I hate to ask," Maes says, refilling Roy's water glass from the ornamental carafe of water placed on the table, as is fashionable in Central restaurants these days. "But are you doing anything tonight?"

"Why, Maes, I'm flattered, but you're _married_."

Roy's posture is a little too stiff, his tone a little too bitter for his joke to be funny, but Maes plows ahead dutifully. "There are some things I think we should talk about. Some things with the Program that I would like another pair of eyes to look at."

"Why my eyes and not the Hawk's Eyes?"

Roy recognizes the look Maes gives him, the one that always stands in for _Why must you make everything so difficult?_ He's intimately familiar with it, in every way that phrasing implies. "Because you're my  _friend_ , Roy, and you're a smart guy. Is it so hard to believe that I would want you to look at it?"

No, not really, except that people tend to forget just how smart Roy Mustang is. His persona makes it easy to forget, unless he wants you to remember, which works to his advantage more often than not, but he is smart. Often too smart for his own good, in fact.

"What is it?"

Maes casts a subtle look around the patio, then through the window of the restaurant, and then even out onto the street. Roy wishes he could brush off his friend's actions as paranoia, but he knows as well as anyone that Central is full of eyes and ears, some of them belonging to his foster mother and other people they can trust, and some of them not.

"We'll discuss it tonight, okay?"

The young waiter chooses that moment to come and take their orders, which Roy finds suspicious. The timing is a little too perfect, but then again, at a place like this one, the waitstaff is probably paid to be conscientious of not interrupting their guests' conversations. Not everything is secretly bearing malicious intent, but Roy occasionally finds it quite hard to remember that.  

* * *

 

Riza is awake when Mustang leaves. She's a very light sleeper, and so when she feels something wriggling (albeit quite delicately) out of her arms, she wakes. But, despite this, she is in no mood to discuss anything that happened the night before, so it's probably just easier if he leaves while she's supposed to be asleep. And so, instead, she lays in his bed (or on his bed, as neither of them actually made it under the covers) and listens to the morning-sounds of Mustang bustling around his apartment. He must be running late for something, because she can't hear the burble of the coffeemaker, but not too late, as she can hear the hiss of the shower. Several minutes after that, he exits the bathroom, smelling like fancy shampoo and soap, and then leaves shortly after.

Riza thinks that, since this is her day off, she should soak this up as much as possible, sleeping in a bed. It's been a while, but her back already feels immensely better, even if she did sleep on her back, with Mustang's head on her chest. She needs to get back to her apartment and do laundry because (she looks down), sure enough, there is a greasy oval left by Mustang's pomade on her shirt. But her car is still, unfortunately, parked in front of Madam Christmas's bar, which means that she'll need to take a cab _there_ , and  _then_ drive home, and that sounds like an awful lot of work for a Saturday morning. It is her day off, after all, and so she will at least give herself the luxury of taking her time getting home, rather than shamefully rushing back like she normally would.

She saunters into his bathroom, air still thick from where Mustang had showered earlier, and turns on the shower before wandering into the kitchen and turning on the coffeemaker. She isn't sure what puzzles her more: how well she knows her way around his apartment, or how different his home is from hers despite the fact that they are, technically, exactly the same. She uses his coffee pot more than her own, at this point, but she keeps almost stepping on things: books, empty cigarette cartons, unopened mail.

With the coffee brewing, she returns to his bathroom. It isn't until she is naked and can see herself in his mirror that she realizes she has never showered in his apartment before. It had always been an option, either one offered by him or threatened by her, but never something she had actually done, and standing naked on his bath mat it feels oddly invasive, as if she were digging through his underwear drawer. But she feels disgusting, the smell of Madam Christmas's cigars and the Devil's Nest clinging to her hair, and she has no luxury to be bashful.

It's odd; she expects his bathroom to be the same as the rest of his apartment--cluttered and grimy--but his shower is remarkably clean. He does have a preponderance of shampoo bottles, but most of them look like the sort of thing a significant other would buy for you, expensive, and most of them look unopened. There is Mustang's own expensive shampoo, which smells like spices and sandalwood (an old money kind of smell, what most people who don't know him assume him to be, and which he is more than happy to corroborate), and the matching conditioner. But other than those, there is only a bar of soap, simple, which probably only cost 100 _cenz_  at a drugstore. That's Mustang, though: the strange cohabitation of the expensive and the cheap, the high-class and the low-brow. She feels a bit tawdry using his shampoo, but desperate times and all that.

Once she gets out and dries off, the smell of coffee (hazelnut, because Mustang is still a baby when it comes to his coffee) is wafting in from the kitchen and Riza feels oddly at home. It's a strange feeling when you're standing in nothing but a towel in your best friend's bathroom, but it's a feeling nonetheless, and for once Riza doesn't want to brush her feelings under the rug like dirt that would offend the company you're expecting to come over.

She considers putting her clothes from the night before back on, but, the unpleasantness of that option aside, she knows that she could borrow Mustang's clothes and he wouldn't mind. She isn't sure how she knows this, since it hasn't ever come up, but she knows it just like she knows that he lets her crash on his couch after a night out drinking, or a bad date (she slept there after her one and only date with Havoc). Like most things about their friendship, it's unspoken, and even if it wasn't, she knows that if she says the three words she never says--"I needed to"--he would let her. And right now she needs a change of clothes, because she went out for _him_ , and she slept with (Next to? Beside? Holding?) _him_ , and so the least he could do is let her borrow a shirt and a pair of sweatpants.

Everything in Mustang's closet is flawlessly ironed, each suit even in its own branded, zippered bag. Everything in his chest of drawers, by contrast, is unfolded, wrinkled, and (potentially) unwashed. Aside from the shirts he had accumulated from the years he has spent going to concerts, he's had many of them since their days at Central U. She finds one in particular that she remembers--a t-shirt gone buttery and soft with years of washing--dark blue, Amestrian blue, with Central University's logo: a capital U with a line running down the middle. On the back it says "Class of 2009." She remembers sitting through his graduation, itchy with sweat under her one nice dress, the one he told her she didn't have to wear. She sat next to Maes Hughes, who had already graduated by the time Mustang started university, preening like a peacock with pride in his boyfriend. She had gotten him a bouquet of flowers, peach roses from the flower shop that Gracia worked at, because she didn't know how else to congratulate him.

She pulls on the shirt and a pair of equally faded sweatpants, slightly amazed at how well the ensemble fits her. Mustang has never been bulky, and he isn't all that much bigger than her. Anyone who saw her would probably assume the clothes were hers. Clean and clothed and feeling significantly more centered than she had upon waking, Riza pours herself a cup of coffee and sits down on Mustang's couch (still lumpy and pockmarked with cigarette burns, but she doubts he'll ever get rid of it).

She thinks, looking around his apartment, drinking his overly sweet coffee and wearing his clothes, that if things had gone differently this might be what her life would look like. She knows herself well enough at this point to let herself acknowledge that, way back when, she had had a crush on Roy Mustang. This isn't overly surprising, and now she writes it off as the byproduct of an isolated childhood, the lack of a strong father figure, and a deep need for attention (oh, how her psychologists would be proud). But what if it wasn't? What if, as a girl, she had truly loved Roy Mustang and his skinny arms and his Xingese eyes and the way he always went out of his way to try and make her happy, even if he usually failed? What if, in a fit of pubescent pique, she had kissed him and they ran away and they wound up in a dinky apartment not altogether different than this one, and she would be drinking his coffee and wearing his clothes, not because hers were now dirty and she was tired from a night of restless sleep, but because that is just what couples  _do?_

But she knows, at this point in her life, that that is just girlish hypothesizing. Even if her childish feelings for Mustang had overwhelmed her so (which they hadn't) and she had made some sort of move (which she didn't), she knows that nothing would have come of it, because Roy Mustang likes sexy women and pretty men and she is neither of those things. And besides, if sharing an apartment with him for year hadn't resulted in any new development in either of them, then she doubts anything would. The true nature of their relationship aside, at this point in their lives, he's stuck with her, and she's stuck with him. There's nothing either of them could do now that could change that.

She goes to set the coffee cup down when she sees that Mustang must have really been running late, because he neglected to cover his tracks. The packets and files that Riza remembers seeing the last time she slept at his apartment ( _This is really becoming an unfortunate habit._ ) are still there. They're disorganized, and one file is even flipped open, as if Mustang realized he was late in the middle of reading through it. A familiar face leers at her from the glossy picture that is paper clipped onto the paper at the front of the file. Even though the Program, like most things these days, is technically paperless, they still have paper duplicates of all the files in their database in case something happens and a power surge wipes their hard drives. Riza knows the people in archiving, mainly girls fresh out of university and hoping to move up the ranks and catch a glimpse of the famous Alchemist pilots. It wouldn't be hard to get these files out of them, especially not if Roy Mustang showed up and flashed them a grin, with a look in his eye like he's sharing something truly secret with you, something  _only_ _you_ can handle. Riza has never been on the receiving end of that particular Roy Mustang, but she's seen it in action, and it's terrifying.

The face looking at her is that of Solf J. Kimblee, the very crazy, very  _dead_ pilot of the Crimson Lotus Alchemist.

"Why does Mustang have Kimblee's file?" Riza asks the empty apartment in the same way she does her own, because even though he can't answer, Black Hayate can at least look interested in what she's saying.

She's seen this file, of course. Kimblee, like Armstrong, Mustang, and Elric, was her responsibility. She wasn't the one who had hired him on--Armstrong and Kimblee were already pilots by the time Riza joined with the Program, having been hired by her grandfather, General Grumman, before he left the Program for unspecified reasons--but he was still under her watch. To this day, he is still her biggest failure. She had never liked him, not the way she liked Armstrong and Mustang at least, and had always been somewhat wary of him, but he was undeniably good at his job. Out of all of their pilots, he scored the best in their simulations, and in the early days of their conflict with Gluttony, he gladly took control of the situation and seemed to have it under control. But maybe that was the problem. Alex Louis Armstrong comes from a long line of military officers (Just ask him. Honestly, he'd be more than happy to tell you about it.), and so views his job as pilot as a familial obligation, though not a begrudging one. Mustang views it as his job to protect his country as best as he can, as well as to repay her father for what he had taught him. For both, piloting is, ultimately, a job; a job that needs to be done, but a job nonetheless. Kimblee, however, truly enjoyed piloting. Enjoyed it too much, perhaps. 

Riza had looked through this file many times after the initial aftermath of the Gluttony situation, as the Ishvalan dust was settling on a near-empty country, trying to find something that the physicians and technicians had missed. Because never-- _never_ \--in any sortie or simulation or test had a pilot gone berserk. And even then, it was never thought  _possible_ that a pilot could be disassembled like Kimblee was, just a pile of various powders and a large puddle of water at the bottom of his plug. For all intents and purposes, Solf J. Kimblee was gone.

If you asked Mustang, it was good riddance. Armstrong was too well-bred to agree with him, too polite, but Riza and Mustang knew that he did. They had never gotten along. Kimblee thought that Mustang's motivations were naïve, that the only way he had managed to even become a pilot in the first place was due to his relationship with Riza (which he always managed to make sound particularly unsavory in his slick, reptilian voice), and Mustang thought that Kimblee was a sadistic creep who should never be allowed within fifty miles of an Alchemist. Mustang turned out to be right in this regard, but he took no pleasure in it. He always seemed slightly guilty at having sussed out Kimblee's instability before he went berserk, like he should have done something.

Riza knows that Mustang has always been dissatisfied with the fact that they were never able to try Kimblee for what he did, but it's hard to deny facts: there is no longer a Kimblee left to try. As far as Riza is concerned, his punishment was just. As a pile of component elements, Kimblee can't hurt anyone ever again, and that's enough for her.

It apparently wasn't enough for Mustang, though. That's the only explanation Riza has for why he has Kimblee's file. She sets it down and picks up another and finds a detailed expense sheet for the Gluttony sortie, billions of  _cenz_ spent on ammunition, power, and medical supplies. Another file has various maps of Ishval and the Eastern quadrant, shaded a ghostly grey in the areas that were demolished, and pricked in red where either Kimblee or Gluttony decimated whole cities and towns. She picks up a packet after that, which shows a transcription of all radio contact between the Alchemists and Central HQ, the page detailing Kimblee's going berserk dog-eared in the lower right-hand corner. Each file and packet is another angle of the conflict with Gluttony, with a particular emphasis on Kimblee. If Riza didn't know any better, she would say that Mustang was in the middle of writing a research paper, the way he has diligently stuck to theme, but broadened the scope of the topic to include every possible side of the issue. Riza, being the child of scholars, appreciates this kind of academic due diligence.

But Mustang, despite his intelligence, is no scholar. He's got Edward Elric's jittery legs, legs made for running, and unless the topic at hand is one of immediate interest to him, he had an annoying habit of falling asleep in lectures. She has never seen him put as much effort into anything as she can see looking at the war zone on his coffee table, the veritable forest of papers all centered around one individual: Solf J. Kimblee.

She wants to call him (she hates texting, it's horrifically impersonal) and ask what this is about, but she knows that he's out, and she knows that even if she got him on the phone, he probably wouldn't answer. He doesn't want her to see this, she can tell by the way he had cleared this from her line of sight the last time she was there. No one handled Ishval well, but they handled it poorly in varying degrees. Alex Armstrong cracked and had to be sent home for therapy before the conflict could even be wrapped up (a decision that became the final crack in his already fractious relationship with his sister, Olivier). Maes Hughes transferred to a desk job and hastily got married, in a gesture so ham-handed that even Mustang couldn't miss it: Not everything is bad in the world. Look at the Good Maes Hughes and his new Good wife Gracia and their new Good marriage. Marriages are symbolic of rebirth, of renewal, of taking two things and making them one. Maes Hughes, in his infinite Goodness, wanted his friends to see that there was still possibility for rebirth, even after all the death they had seen.

Mustang didn't seem all that different after Ishval: he still drank too much and smoked too much and went out too much, but it was the same level of Too Much that he had done before. Riza realizes, now, that both that statement was untrue, and that he hid something else. He hid this, this obsession with What Went Wrong and how it could have been fixed, even though, now, there was nothing that could be done save trying to keep it from happening again. Suddenly Mustang's question in the hospital after the sortie with Lust--"Do you think we have another Kimblee on our hands?"--doesn't seem so innocuous or so unexpected. For a moment, Mustang probably thought his worst fear had been confirmed, and in the shape of a fifteen-year-old boy with long hair and two automail limbs, no less.

She feels slightly sick to her stomach now, and it has nothing to do with the drinking the night before or drinking coffee on an empty stomach. The only thing missing from this set-up is a cork board with pictures of Kimblee attached by thumbtacks and a piece of yarn. This singlemindedness of his is charming and expected when it comes to him talking about how, one day when he's old(er) and grey(er), he wants to run the Program. Everything he does is, at least in some way, oriented toward that goal, like a loadstone toward a paper-clip, but this is different. This is unhealthy and paranoid and  _guilty_. Roy Mustang is supposed to be shameless, but the way he's compulsively clearing his tracks of this late-night research is anything but.

She finds herself feeling oddly embarrassed at having seen it.

Things are starting to slot together in a way that she doesn't like. This is no casual research, and (although she isn't sure how long this has been going on) it would have taken a while to accumulate all of this information, even with the help of the swooning archivists. She is struck with the image of knocking on his apartment door at two in the morning some weeks ago, expecting him to be either out or asleep, but finding him awake and claiming to be "working." Of _course_ Roy Mustang wouldn't be doing paperwork in the middle of the night (or ever). The way he had hastily hid it from her before he went to bed, he knew that she wouldn't like this, this fixation. The morning Ed Elric showed up at Central HQ but Mustang had turned up hungover, she had assumed he had been out with Havoc, like he always used to be, but Havoc said he had no idea what Mustang had been doing the night before. Riza knows now; he had been doing this, and, to place a cherry atop this incredibly concerning sundae, he had been doing it drunk.

She suddenly feels like an intruder in this apartment that has seen so much of her over the years, the place where, just minutes before, she had felt as comfortable wearing his clothes as her own, and so she reaches for a steno pad that is lying atop the stack of papers (the top page of which already bears hastily scribbled notes that Riza has difficulty deciphering) and a pen and writes out a quick note:

_Borrowed a shirt and some pants since I slept in my own clothes last night. Thanks for the hospitality.  x R_

Unsure of where the last night has left them, she settles for something in between "Riza" and "Hawkeye" and just opts for her first initial. Maybe she should use "H" instead, but that feels too informal for someone she had cradled like a child while he wept, even for her.

She meticulously cleans out the coffee mug (a cheeky thrift store purchase from Breda that reads "#1 Dad") and places it back in the cabinet, leaving behind a missing shirt and pants and an intentionally placed note as the only signs she had been there in the first place.

* * *

Winry loves junk. She loves junk so much, in fact, that she doesn't even get offended when people call it "junk." Just ask Ed, he's tried. Winry had just shrugged and said "One man's junk is one very smart teenage girl's reasonably priced treasure." Rockbell Automail is known for what the charitable call their "creativity." Being based in Resembool, they don't get a lot of traffic, and low traffic means low funds, and low funds means that, if one wants to stay in business, one has to get creative.

Some of Winry's fondest childhood memories are of spending long summer mornings with Pinako, scouring Resembool's yard sales for anything that could be disassembled and melted down into something of use. Winry has Pinako's eye for hidden treasures, and Ed's skill at haggling. A few summers before, Pinako was too busy with clients to be bothered to go trolling through the junk heaps of Resembool, and so Winry had dragged Ed and Al along with her.

Al is a delight to go junking with. He finds joy in often bizarre, random trinkets, and is excellent to go with because, honestly, who could refuse Alphonse Elric anything? The boy is practically an overgrown kitten. Ed, on the other hand is...difficult. Like with most things, truthfully. He acquiesced both because Al wanted to go and because Winry told him that, if they didn't, then they might not have the material to fix his automail the next time he broke it. (It was never just that the automail  _broke_ , it was always that Ed  _broke it_.) And so, sourly, he had agreed and Winry had fixed them all lemonade in water bottles to help fight the heat. 

Winry isn't stupid. She knows that Ed hates the heat, and that most of the reasons why aren't his fault. He only wears dark colors in order to avoid getting automail grease stains on his clothes, and he's still remarkably self-conscious about his prosthetics, opting for long sleeves and pants and hoodies rather than the shorts and t-shirts that Al wears. Winry does what she can for him, though, and that day she had even managed to have him allow her to put his hair up in a bun so that it wasn't hanging against the back of his neck. If Winry is gonna be honest, he looked rather fetching that way. 

They had chatted blithely the whole walk around town, the inconsequential, easily forgettable chatter of summer mornings, until they came across an estate sale. Estate sales were rare in Resembool, and still are, but are markedly less uncommon after the conflict with Gluttony. For the first time in Resembool's history, there were people who no longer had families to settle their affairs, and so something had to be done with the stuff that was left over. In the year or so after Gluttony and the Crimson Alchemist destroyed a large portion of their town, estate sales were quite common. 

Winry always felt a bittersweet kind of solemnity whenever she used parts she found at estate sales. She was taking something that used to belong to someone, maybe even someone she knew at one point (Resembool is only so big; everyone tends to know everyone), and giving it a new life, a life where it can help people. Winry's an engineer, and she's never been a fan of poetry or novels or anything like that, but she thinks there's something kind of beautiful and poetic about that.

At the estate sale she found with Al and Ed, they didn't find any scrap metal, or anything that could even be broken down into scrap metal. What they did find, however, were two huge crates full of cassette tapes. Cassettes were out of fashion before any of them were old enough to buy their own music (And who buys music these days, anyway?), and Winry has always found them vaguely fascinating. Kneeling on the plush, Resembool grass, she took one out of its jewel case and began toying with the tape.

"What's that?" Al had asked, looking at Winry from where he had stood, going through a table piled high with books.

"It's a cassette," she said, holding up the tape so that he could see it. "They're so hilariously impractical; I don't know why anybody thought they were a good idea." But Winry, as much as she loves practicality and efficiency in her work, loves the obsolete on her own time. She had bought an old record player from one such estate sale several weeks before going to this one, and by the end of the summer she would have it running smoother than when it was brand new. ( _Honestly, what kind of idiot buys a belt-driven record player? They're more trouble than they're worth, and even though internal motor turntables are more expensive, they run better and hardly ever need repair._ ) This would hardly even give her an afternoon's entertainment, but they'd been out in the heat all morning, and there was still half a pitcher of lemonade in her fridge. She was feeling sleepy and sun-drunk, and so she gave the man running the sale fifty  _cenz_ and stuck the thing in the pocket of her dungarees. 

Back at Pinako's house, they laid on the hardwood floor (much cooler than the couch or the kitchen table) talking and playing card games while Winry disassembled and reassembled the cassette, her one, small conquest from a full morning of searching. Pinako would be disappointed, and Winry was a bit crestfallen as well, but it was better than nothing, and she was only out fifty  _cenz_ for it. After she had gotten it reassembled, she held it up, letting the light filter through the clear plastic.

"I never asked," Al said. "What tape is it?"

Winry pulled the jewel case out of her pocket and read off the artist and title. It was a collection of folk songs set to piano, specifically ones common in the Eastern region. Feeling heavy and tired, Winry ran into Pinako's workshop where she kept a boombox radio to listen to while she worked. It was old, a leftover from when Winry's father had left Resembool to go to medical school, but it had a tape deck. Winry popped the tape in and reclined back on the floor, where Ed and Al were already laying with closed eyes. 

The songs were quiet and sparsely arranged, only a piano, and Winry found herself drifting off to sleep when she heard a hitching sound, like someone trying to catch their breath. She opened her eyes, propping herself up on her elbows, to see Ed staring wide-eyed at the ceiling, clenching his bottom lip so hard between his teeth that it was starting to draw blood.

"Ed, what's wrong?"

Upon hearing Winry speak, Al opened his eyes as well. "Brother?"

"This song..." He turned to face his brother. "Al, do you remember this?"

Al listened quietly for a moment before shaking his head. "No, I don't think so."

"This is the lullaby that Mom always sang for us," Ed said quietly. "It had words but...but, I can't remember them anymore, Al." Ed's eyes were wild and wide with tears, still suspended in the corners of his eyes. "It's only been two years, Al, why can't I remember the words?"

Winry had let him keep the tape after that, and Ed had gotten somewhat fixated upon it. Even with the track titles and some background information in the jewel case, Ed couldn't track down sheet music for the song that included the lyrics that his mother had used to lull him and his brother to sleep when they were children. For his birthday, Winry constructed Ed a portable tape player, so that he could listen to it whenever he wanted. Now, in the long nights he spent in Riza's apartment, unable to sleep, he listened to it, track twenty-five, on loop, until the sun came up.

Al can't remember the song. Ed is only a year older than him, but it's amazing what that one extra year has done to them. Ed's memories of their childhood, especially of their mother and of Hohenheim (Ed won't let either of them call the man "Dad"), are so much crisper than his, and occasionally it feels like all of those years in their home, with their parents, were just a dream. The things he can remember are foggy, like he's viewing them through a steamed-up window, and it's makes his mother seem like a ghost to him. He knows that he's only fourteen, and that fourteen years is nothing compared to Riza's twenty-seven or Mustang's thirty, but it occasionally feels as if the years he spent as a child were a thousand years ago, and that the one year Ed existed without him is an eternity all its own.

Memories of childhood are difficult for Al to remember consciously, but he dreams vividly. That's part of the problem. Either he is having nightmares that feel very real, or he finds himself in his mother's arms, or watching from the window as his father ties a swing to the tree in front of their house. Either way, he wakes up feeling exhausted. He can only ever remember the nightmares.

For once though, he wakes up feeling rested. It's sad that this should be so out of the ordinary, but unfortunately it is. Also unusual, he finds himself on Riza's couch. He lifts his head, limbs still heavy with sleep, but, for once, not stiff. He feels young for the first time in a long time. From the kitchen he can hear the sound of voices and can smell frying eggs.

It's still early, so early, in fact, that he guesses that Winry and Ed haven't slept, which is concerning. But though he can see that Winry and Ed are exhausted, they don't seem upset. Their laughs are a bit woozy and weak-kneed, in the way everything is funny when you've been up for too long, and Winry is in her cover-alls, her hair tied back in one of Pinako's old bandanas. Ed has his hair in a ponytail, in the way he has taken to wearing it in order to fight the heat, and Al is hit by a strange kind of déjà vu, like remembering something from a dream. He stares at Winry, then at Ed, then casts his gaze around the living room and the kitchen, but it still sits in his mind like a rock in his shoe that he can't shake out.

Ed notices then that he's awake. "Sleeping beauty has awoken at last," Ed says with a sleepy, but easy, smile. He's holding the bowl that Winry had beaten the eggs in, which still has a whisk sticking out of the top. For once, Ed is in shorts and a tank top, automail on full display in the way he does when he's only around family. Ed is a bit like a feral cat. It takes a lot of comfort and trust in order for him to get settled. "You okay, Al?" Ed asks, brow furrowing. "You're looking at me kinda funny."

It is then that it hits Al, with all the speed of a punch to the gut.  _He looks like Hohenheim._ Al's not sure how he knows this with such certainty. Hohenheim left their mother when he was still very small, too small to really be able to remember much of anything, and yet, looking at his brother, he knows with perfect clarity that he is the spitting image of their father, all golden and ponytailed. He's not nearly as tall, and doesn't yet have the spectacles he remembers his father wearing ( _How do I remember that? I don't remember remembering that._ ), but it's still there, and it makes his throat go tight for some reason. Looking at his brother, he feels homesick and at home all at once.

He clears his throat, hoping that Ed interprets it as clearing away the sleep in his voice and not trying to keep from crying like a little boy. "It's nothing. Are you guys making scrambled eggs?"

"With cheese!" Winry chirps brightly from the stove, hair luminous in the early light, even under a bandana. "Your favorite!"

When he was younger, shortly after their mother was killed and Ed started going to university, Al lived in Resembool with the Rockbells while Ed studied in East City. It was truly the only time Al has ever known what it was like to feel lonely, and even then it was a tempered kind of loneliness. Pinako taught Al bits and pieces of engineering so that he could earn his keep (as if Alphonse Elric needed to earn his keep in order for the Rockbells to keep him up, but Pinako knew that Al didn't like not feeling useful), and he spent his days going to school with Winry and video-chatting Ed. But when Ed was home in the summers, he took long-term loans on books he had read during the school year and brought them back so that Al could read them. This is how Al learned about alchemy, and how he became mildly obsessed with the idea of human transmutation. He wasn't stupid; he knew that alchemy was a fiction and that he could never, in fact, transmute a person, but he spent long days daydreaming about somehow figuring out what these men had missed hundreds of years ago and successfully bringing back his mother.

He told Ed about this, and it was the first time he had ever made his brother cry.

After that, he let his daydream go and gingerly gave the books on alchemy back to his brother. They suddenly felt very heavy in his hands. It wasn't that he stopped missing his mother (he seriously doubts that is possible; Trisha Elric was a fantastic mother, and Al has a sharp enough memory to remember that at least), but he began to accept the way things were. But now, sitting around Riza Hawkeye's small, rickety kitchen table, Al finds himself wondering why he would ever daydream about bending the laws of nature to take things back to the way they were. There are people who have mothers and fathers and siblings with all of their limbs and will never feel the kind of love that he feels at that moment, eating cheesy scrambled eggs with his robot pilot brother and his gearhead friend. It's a peculiar kind of love, but it's so overwhelmingly comforting that he thinks that all of the horrible things that have happened to them have brought them to precisely this place, and he finds that he isn't particularly angry at the universe anymore.

* * *

 

Riza Hawkeye returns to her apartment to find it empty of teenagers, but now with two notes that had not been there before.

The first is on the kitchen table:

_Decided not to waste a nice day sitting inside. Will be back by dinner._

(And then, in a different hand) _Hope Pilot Bastard didn't drive you too crazy last night._

Ed, then.

At the bottom it is signed, in three separate hands:

_Love,_

_Al, Winry, & Ed_

She finds herself smiling at this little piece of paper (which turns out to be the back of a calculus test that Winry had been handed back; she had gotten a 98%), liking the space it occupies on her table. She wouldn't call it a fear, but Riza has a definite discomfort with empty homes. She shouldn't, not anymore, not after living alone for as long as she has (save Black Hayate of course), but occasionally, if Black Hayate is asleep and she finds herself alone in the kitchen, she finds herself transported unwillingly to the four silent years back West. When her mother died, it was like her father expected them to die with her. Maybe that's why she had thought, as a girl, that she had been in love with Mustang. It would be hard not to love the person who resurrected you.

But now, now that the Elrics and Winry were here, her home had noise again. No, not noise. Noise what she had to fight against in the Devil's Nest, noise was what always seemed to occupy her mind if she didn't always keep it occupied, wasn't constantly keeping it busy with games of mental fetch. This wasn't noise, it was _sound_ , and that was different, and beautiful.

She takes the note and folds it, delicately, into a square and places it in one of the pockets of Mustang's sweatpants, wandering, happy but delirious, over to the couch. She is exhausted--physically, emotionally, mentally, hell, maybe even spiritually--and wants nothing more than to waste her Saturday sleeping. And yet, there, placed almost bashfully on a cushion is another note.

She recognizes Winry's handwriting immediately. It manages to be both precise and girlish, and unlike Mustang's is as easy to read as typeset.

_No more sleeping on the couch, Captain! While you were out, me and Ed worked on a little project so that you can get your bed back. Consider it just a small thank-you for letting us live with you. Ed and Al will never say it (well, Ed will never say it) but they truly appreciate all you've done for us, and so do I. This is the least we could do._

_x Winry_

Feeling a slightly dizzy mixture of maternal affection and confusion, one emotion she has possibly never felt before and the other one she has become all too familiar with recently, Riza walks warily, note in hand, into the room that used to be hers.

What she sees is exactly what she had seen the morning the Elrics showed up: her bed, with its burgundy-colored sheets. And yet, in the space between the left side of her bed and the wall is now another bed. Well, perhaps "cot" might be more appropriate: it's roughly the size of a military cot, and seems to be constructed entirely of scrap metal. But, atop the uncomfortably steampunk construction is a twin mattress, clothed in sheets the robin's egg color that Winry has taken to wearing. 

Winry and Ed had, in a night, constructed a bed, so that Riza would be able to sleep in her own bed again.

She isn't sure what is more confusing, the fact that two teenagers were able to stockpile this amount of junk metal without her knowing and construct a bedframe in a single night, or the fact that they would ever feel the need to. It never even occurred to Riza to begrudge Winry for taking her room. It only seemed right. For most people, obligation doesn't extend this far, but she has to remind herself that she is thinking of the boy who risked life and literal limb to save his brother and the girl who followed her best friend halfway across the country so that he wouldn't have to fight alone.

She remembers what she had thought when Hughes was attempting to let Riza allow them to stay with him, when she was trying to understand why they would come all the way out to Central from Resembool.

_That's not obligation. That's love._

She sinks down into her own bed and gets the best sleep she's had in weeks.

* * *

Sometimes, Maes wonders how he managed to date Roy Mustang for as long as he did. He's so insufferable in so many ways and, despite having just turned thirty, is one of the most immature people Maes has ever met. He occasionally thinks that Elicia has a better grasp on some things than her Uncle Roy, to which she would reply "Of course, Daddy, Uncle Roy is a boy!" And, you know, at this point Maes would be hard pressed to disagree with her.

His time with Roy both feels very faraway and very recent, clouded in the dust of Ishval and thus unfortunately locked away in the same places in his mind where he keeps the memories he would rather not think about. And he's done a fairly good job of it, too. Well, he's done a better job that Roy and (although she would probably shoot him for thinking this) Riza. He thinks getting married and starting a family is a pretty healthy coping mechanism. More healthy than drinking himself stupid or bottling up everything he feels. Maes isn't stupid, or at least not as stupid as Roy and everyone else they work with. He knows that Riza isn't unfeeling. Underneath her stoic exterior is a heart as red and bloody as anyone else's. He's just not sure that she's ever had enough time to sit and feel the things she needs to feel. He's not sure she knows how.

He just wishes that talking with either of them wasn't like pulling teeth. Part of him wishes he could bring up his findings with Riza, but she's too deeply enmeshed with the brass by this point and, unfortunately, that would make her a liability. Roy, on the other hand, being only a lowly pilot and his best friend, to boot, makes him the perfect candidate. The only problem is getting him to shut up long enough to discuss anything.

And so that is why he is currently walking to Seele, a quiet little bar not too far from his house. Conversations like these are dangerous in a place like Central City (and, he knows now, anywhere in Amestris), and he's too paranoid to have them at home where Gracia or Elicia could overhear and possibly place themselves in danger for knowing what Maes knows. He had picked Seele especially, because it would be guaranteed to not be empty (it was in a trendy area of town and now, in the brief period before dinner, would be at peak hours), but it had been open long enough to not be entirely full. In other words, they would be able to converse uninterrupted, but there would be enough people there to provide background noise to deter any nosy bystanders. That, and if he is going to talk about this, with Roy of all people, he wants to have a drink.

In his messenger bag (leather, heavy, an old birthday gift from Roy that is too nice to part with) he has a file that makes him feel like he may as well be carrying a bomb into a slightly-out-of-fashion bar.

Inside, Seele looks like the kind of place where you would have a clandestine discussion of what Maes jokingly referred to as "conspiracy theories," but which may be much more than theories at this point. Roy Mustang isn't the only person who lays awake at night thinking about the organization they have sworn their lives to. (Maes knows about the Kimblee files. Of course Maes knows about the Kimblee files. Do you think  _Roy Mustang, Alchemist Pilot_ would go slumming down to the archives himself? Of course not. The kids in the archives like Maes, though. Unlike  _some_ people, they actually enjoy seeing pictures of Elicia.) He sets the bag carefully down on the floor by his chair, right as a waiter comes up to the table.

"Can I get you a drink, sir?"

The blood chills in Maes's veins, going thin and icy. The waiter standing by his table, still polite and well-dressed, is unmistakable: slim-hipped and androgynous, with long, spiky hair and a thin, catlike grin. There are two explanations for why the same waiter from brunch that morning would be here. The first is that this kid--who can't be particularly old--goes to Central U and is working two waitstaff jobs in order to pay the bills. But Maes has always been too optimistic, and he knows that. When he allows his eyes to wander down just slightly, to the thin, muscular legs coming out the bottom of the waiter's short skirt, he sees a tattoo on their thigh, in bright red ink, of a snake eating its own tale. An ouroboros. His mouth goes suddenly dry. He had been so  _careful_ , but the kid had been in dress pants at brunch, how could he have known?

"Scotch please. The most expensive you've got."

The import of that isn't lost on the waiter, and their purple eyes glitter hungrily. "Of course, sir."

Heart thudding in his chest in a way it hasn't since he got back from Ishval, since he had to live in constant fear of imminent death, he steps outside to make a call. He takes his bag with him.

* * *

Roy isn't sure why he's dreading getting drinks with Maes so much. After all, Maes is his best friend, was before they dated and continues to be even after they broke up. Roy will always love him in a strange kind of way that, at this point, has nothing to do with sex or romance. He just knows that Maes wants to have a Serious Conversation about something involving the Program, the same kinds of things he's wanted to talk to Roy about for weeks now, but it always comes at the worst times, like this one. Roy's brain is still foggy from the hangover, and now also from the two Bloody Mary's he had with brunch. He doesn't want to have to think. He wants to lay in bed with the curtains drawn and watch Netflix until he doesn't feel anymore. After the longest birthday of his life, hungover brunch, and then two hours at the Hughes house, playing with a sticky (but ultimately adorable and frighteningly intelligent) three-year-old, Roy would like to transcend existence for a while.

For not the first time, Roy is glad that he's an atheist, because if he wasn't then it wouldn't take much to convince him that God hated him.

He feels the same kind of horror at finding that he hadn't put away his research that he felt when Christmas had walked in on him watching porn as a teenager. This is something both private and very, very embarrassing. Roy, unlike Armstrong, had been immediately cleared by the psychological staff of the Program once they got back from Ishval and consequently released back into active duty as a pilot. But Roy was raised with sisters who lied to men for a living, one of which had actually been studying psychology while she was under Christmas's employ. It wasn't hard for Roy to bamboozle some mental health professionals into thinking he was fine.

 _But this,_ Roy thinks, looking at the artifacts of his obsession,  _isn't fine_. 

Even with her watchful eyes, Roy could fool himself into thinking that maybe Hawkeye had missed it in her hurry to get out of his apartment. But, seeing his steno pad very purposefully placed directly on top of Kimblee's personnel file, he can't be allowed to have even that small amount of comfort. He exhales shakily and picks it up, expecting to see a lengthy discussion of why what he is doing is inappropriate, or worrying, or possibly explaining her wish to talk about this in person in the future or get the files confiscated. That isn't what he sees.

_Borrowed a shirt and some pants since I slept in my own clothes last night. Thanks for the hospitality.  x R_

Like most things done by Captain Riza Hawkeye, this is infuriatingly cryptic, but, like with most things done by Captain Riza Hawkeye, Roy is skilled enough now in understanding her to interpret it: She looked through the files, she knows they are there, but she is going to let him continue what he is doing, either because she doesn't want to talk about it, or, perhaps, because she trusts him. It's the last part that confuses him, the way she signed it: just "R." It isn't like them to sign things using only initials (although it isn't particularly like them to leave each other notes, either), but if they were to, Roy thinks they would probably use their last initials, not their first.

Roy was so preoccupied with this tiny, arcane detail that he hadn't noticed his phone buzzing in his back pocket. He half expects it to be Riza, since he almost believes that she would know that he had found her note with her strange, preternatural knowledge of all things, but it isn't. He has a missed call from Maes. He rolls his eyes. Maes Hughes is an incredibly impatient man. He's probably sitting in the bar already (a full hour early, Roy would like to add), wondering why no one else in the world is on his same, skewed timetable. But then, moments later, moments before Roy is about to call him back and tell him to  _chill the fuck out, he'll be there soon_ , when he sees something unexpected on the screen of his phone: a voicemail. Hughes  _never_ leaves voicemails. It isn't his style; if you don't answer his call on the first try, he'll just keep calling until you do, what he has to tell you being  _far too important_ to simply leave in a voicemail. This is bizarre. Brow knit, Roy opens the voicemail and holds the phone tentatively to his ear.

 _Roy, it's me. You probably think I'm calling to ask why you're not here yet._ He laughs.  _But, for once, I'm not calling to scold you. I think I've scolded you enough for one lifetime._ His voice sounds odd. It's too calm. Maes Hughes runs almost solely on sheer enthusiasm. Hearing him sounding this serene is unnerving.  _I don't think I ever apologized to you for breaking your heart. And don't laugh, Roy Mustang, because you know it's true. Oh, and another thing: please keep Gracia and Elicia safe for me. They really do love you, and without me there you'd be the next best thing. But don't let this stop you from figuring out what's going on with the Program. I've got the files with me, but..._ For the first time in the voicemail he can hear Maes's voice begin to tremble.  _I doubt they'll get to you. You'll need to start over, but you have to do this. This...it's bigger than us. It's bigger than the Alchemists. It's..._ He coughs around the warble in his throat.  _If I see you again I'll truly apologize, Roy, because I think we'll both deserve it at that point. See ya._

Roy sits for a moment, listening to the dial tone. The sound in his phone is impossibly hollow and huge, as if it's echoing through a cathedral, or a tomb. He considers calling Maes back, but knows that nothing will come of it. Nothing will come of anything anymore. He doesn't want to cry, because he hates crying, and he did more than his fair share of it last night, into Riza's muscular shoulder. And because he knows that if he sits there any longer he'll cry, he runs.

Riza's apartment isn't a far drive, maybe five miles, but five miles running and five miles driving are very different distances. He runs it anyway, because he isn't sure where else he would go. His dependence on her has tightened over the last few weeks, and now he feels it around his neck like a noose, choking the air from his lungs. If he didn't go to see Riza, he isn't sure what he would do. There are times when his need for her in the purest sense of needing her, in whatever capacity she presented herself, was so strong he felt like he might die, and he feels like that now. So he runs. Maybe a mile in, when his chest begins to heave,  it begins to rain, and he welcomes it, both out of a desire for the world to show some sort of sympathetic fallacy at the beautiful, rare thing that had just been taken from it, and to cool his sickly, feverish head. 

Roy is good at running out of sheer stubbornness. He had always been a thin, infirm kid, and so he didn't take to it like Riza did, all strong, taut muscles and golden, Amestrian blood. Pure and vital, the wet dream of the Amestrian military. But Roy has never been what they wanted: too foreign, too small, too ambitious. But he sticks onto them like a tick, and now he's sucked up too much of their oily, poisonous blood to let go. He owes Maes that much.

When he gets to the foot of Riza's apartment building, his hangover, his breakfast, his newly blossoming grief, and the exertion catches up with him and he retches into the grass. Only allowing the rain to clean the sweat and the sick off of his face for a moment, he races, shaking and damp, into the building's lobby and up the elevator to Riza's floor--only the thirty-third, significantly better than the forty-seventh--and considers briefly whether or not he's made a horrible mistake. Maybe he misunderstood, maybe everything is fine, maybe  _Maes_ is fine, and there's no reason to be here and trouble Riza any more than he's already troubled her the last few days. 

But he knows. He's not stupid, and neither is Maes, and Maes knows-- _knew_ , he corrects himself--that he would understand. This is a game they've been playing for a long time, of talking about things without ever talking about them. It's a game he and Maes mastered in Ishval, but a game that Riza Hawkeye has been playing her entire life.

And so he knocks.

She answers the door, hair loose, still in his Central U t-shirt and sweatpants.

"Mustang? What is it?"

The symmetry isn't lost on him, that this is exactly what he must have looked like that first stormy afternoon on the Hawkeyes' doorstep, shivering and wet and, most of all, scared.

"Can I come in?"

* * *

Ed has been complaining the whole walk back to the apartment.

"Of course, the one day I don't wear a hoodie, it rains." He has his arms crossed resolutely over his skinny chest in the way that makes it look like he doesn't care that the people they pass are staring at his automail arm and leg, even though he does. In Resembool it hadn't been nearly as much of an issue; because of the conflict with Gluttony, automail was an incredibly common sight in Resembool, especially since he lived with two automail engineers. But the people in Central lived much softer lives, happily cloistered away from any warfare or anything else that would cause a loss of limb save a bizarre accident. Ed looked like a novelty, and he hated it.

"I think it's nice," Al says, arching his face up toward the rain like a flower reaching for the sun. "At least it'll cool down now. It's been so hot all day."

Which is precisely why they had gone out in the first place. On a day as hot as this one, nothing sounded better than ice cream, and so they set out in search of what was, purportedly, the best ice cream shop in Central. But on a scorching Saturday afternoon, the line was out the door, and they had been gone longer than they had anticipated. It was worth it, though; the internet hadn't lied, and the ice cream had been amazing, just perfect for a hot, muggy day. But then, of course, on their walk home it had started to pour.

Ed's foul mood isn't helped by the way the rain makes Winry's shirt cling to her in an  _entirely inappropriate fashion_ , and so he walks on Al's side, keeping his eyes resolutely forward.

"I feel bad tracking water into Riza's apartment," Winry says, wringing the bottom of her skirt out gingerly onto the floor of the elevator, while Ed carefully studies the buttons delineating each floor.

"I'm sure Hayate's tracked in worse," Ed says.

"Are you kidding?" Winry says, flipping her sopping ponytail back over her shoulder. "That dog is the best trained animal I've ever seen, it's just that he's a puppy. I heard a rumor that he's technically ranked as a second lieutenant." 

"The best trained?" Al asks, eyes surprisingly wicked. "I thought we had Ed trained pretty well."

Ed has a very loud and very offended reply to that, but the elevator doors slide open and they are on Riza's floor.

"We're home!" Ed shouts as he opens the door, but the end of his sentence trails off awkwardly when he sees Riza sitting on the couch (that is now no longer her bed!) next to, of all people, Roy Mustang, both with drawn faces and quiet hands. "What's going on?"

Al and Winry stand awkwardly in the open doorway, dripping, unsure of what to do.

A silence hangs over the apartment for several long seconds, settling like dust, as if both Riza and Mustang are unsure of what to say. And then the bubble pops.

"Nothing," Mustang says, his practiced nonchalance settling back into his bones. "Just came to retrieve my clothes."

He passes a look to Riza like a tennis ball, which she drops. Her response to Mustang is too slow, and it makes Ed nervous. "Oh yeah," she says finally, clumsily. "Let me change out of these." She retreats to her room (which is now hers again!), unusually dumb-footed for the usually graceful Captain.

But, as much as this sits uncomfortably in Ed's mind, he's young, and he's tired, and he would rather believe it when adults tell him that nothing is wrong. And so he takes the bait that is so clearly proffered to him, and he bites. "Why does Riza have your clothes?"

Mustang wiggles a most-likely-manicured ebony eyebrow. "Wouldn't you like to know, kid."

"Don't lie to him, Mustang," Riza shouts from behind her closed bedroom door.

"Of course," Mustang says, "as if I could ever delude myself into thinking that I was worthy of the resplendent Captain Hawkeye."

Okay, he's laying it on thick, and even Ed can tell that much. His jokes are less fluid, his smile too forced. Something is definitely going on here, but Ed sincerely wishes that there wasn't.

At that, the "resplendent Captain Hawkeye" exits her room, now clothed in a pair of jeans and a soft-looking grey shirt. Aside from her Mustang's-shirt-and-pants ensemble, this is the most dressed down he has ever seen her. Said shirt and pants are folded neatly and perfectly square, like a department store display, and she hands them to Mustang like some sort of royal sacrament. He takes the clothes from her and smiles, the muscles in his face pulling uncomfortably, and gives a small bow to Winry standing in the doorway.

"If you'll excuse me, Miss Rockbell." Winry steps aside, and then he is gone, closing the door behind him.

"What a weirdo," Ed says, to fill some of the silence that  is in the apartment in Mustang's wake. Mustang has the habit of leaving a room and then sucking all the sound up after him. Their small living room feels suddenly vacuous, even with four people standing in it.

* * *

 

"I hate playing waitstaff," says Envy. "It's never any fun. I never get to do any _fun_ stuff anymore."

Wrath, seated in the war room, takes a sip from the tea that he had made Olivier make for him. General Bradley is, perhaps, the only person in the world who could make Colonel Olivier Mira Armstrong do anything, let alone something as banal and effeminate as make him tea. The tea tastes twice as good because of that. Power makes everything taste sweeter.

"You're not doing this because it's supposed to be _fun._ " He spits the word out of his mouth like a watermelon seed, like fun is a foreign, abstract concept translated from a distant language.  _Fun? Oh no, we don't have that here in Amestris. What a barbaric idea._ "You do this because it's your job, and if you don't do it I'll flay you alive."

Envy sighs, the haughty, bored sigh of a wealthy teenage girl. "You know, sometimes I forget why they call you 'Wrath,' but it's shit like this that reminds me exactly why."

"Is it done?" Wrath asks, unfazed by Envy's impertinence. He may be younger than Envy, but he feels much older, and he clings to his authority with knuckles gone white and bloodless.

"Yup," Envy says, hand on miniskirted hip. "Maes Hughes is officially dead. Good thing too; he was too smart for his own good, and that could've gotten annoying fast."

"And the files?"

Envy holds up a heavy leather messenger bag, with a large rust-colored splotch on the front like a piece of modern art. "They're all in here. Maes Hughes was a very busy man."

"I like busy men," Wrath says smoothly. "But only when they're working for me."

"What are you gonna do about Mustang? He was supposed to meet him at that bar."

"I'll handle Mustang," Wrath says. "Don't you worry about that."

"This should send him a pretty message," Envy says, grin wide and toothy as a jackal.

"And besides," Wrath says, pouring himself another cup of tea. "If he gets too uppity, he's just a piece of equipment. We can always replace him." He takes a sip from his cup without blowing on it first, savoring the way the boiling liquid scalds down his throat, and savoring even more the feeling of his throat knitting itself back together again. "There are plenty more where he came from."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> EDIT: Okay, so the chapter title /used/ to be from "Bury Our Friends" by Sleater-Kinney, but I ran into a song so perfect for this chapter that I was actually compelled to go back and change it. The chapter title is /now/ from "Shadow Song (Peel Session Version)," by the Mountain Goats
> 
> Also, for the logo for Central U I used the symbol that it seen on one of the branches of the Central City library in Brotherhood. I don't know if it's technically affiliated with the university, but the symbol was a little too perfect (get it? Central U? ba dum tss) to pass up
> 
> Also also also, the voicemail that Hughes leaves Roy is very, very heavily inspired by the voicemail that Kaji leaves Misato in episode 21 of Eva, so I must give credit where credit is due.
> 
> And that is all of my notes for this chapter. Promise.


	11. "You're near the brink of complete implosion..."

They were, perhaps, the only people in the whole history of the world who ever started dating over a quiche.

The party had been his idea. Not his idea in that he was the one who threw the party, but his idea in that they were going. After a whole year back in Central City, Roy Mustang was getting very good at inviting himself to other people's parties. He took it all in stride, though, knowing that this was simply what you had to do until people knew who you were, and then they would be falling all over themselves to invite you to their parties themselves.

It was the beginning of a scorching fall, the leaves on all the old trees at Central U too befuddled to change colors, and so they still hung, green and confused, into early December, at which point they would simply fall off, like actors who had missed a vital cue and hastily fled the stage, embarrassed. And so in September, Centralites acted as if it were still July, frolicking about in shorts and miniskirts and backless dresses. This was all the better for Roy, because it meant that you never had to leave things at the cloakroom of clubs. If the bizarre, post-apocalyptic weather saved him a couple hundred  _cenz_ every Saturday night, he found it difficult to complain. 

"Do you know Rebecca Catalina?" Roy asked over a dinner of cheap, Xingese takeout in their living room. He had bought them a TV cheap at a thrift store, and while he had expected Riza to stare transfixed at it like a country bumpkin who had never been exposed to the technology of the Big City, she turned her nose up at it like a finicky cat. While he watched TV, Riza always seemed to be doing something else. After her father died, despite the fact that she never really seemed to mourn his passing, she had grown oddly attached to the little handgun that she had pointed in his face the first time he saw her. On nights when it rained and she couldn't sleep (The nightmares never made her scream; they just made her restless, and while Roy would always pretend he didn't notice the way she dragged her body out of bed in the middle of the night, he did.), she could often be found in the kitchen under the greasy glow of the one kitchen light, meticulously disassembling, cleaning, and reassembling the gun, like some sort of puzzle. Riza Hawkeye was always much more talkative with her hands than her mouth. "She's in your year," Roy elaborated when she didn't answer.

She was carefully picking water chestnuts out of her Moo Goo Gai Pan and placing them on the plastic lid of her takeout container, delicate as a surgeon. "No. Why?"

Roy never got mad at Riza. It was difficult to get mad at her. At times she seemed so tiny and fragile, and at others she seemed so capable and well-managed, and at either of those times there was nothing to yell at her for. But occasionally, Roy would get frustrated with her, and it was times like this when that would happen. Riza had only just started at Central U a few weeks before, sure, and she had only been in Central for a year, of course, but it didn't seem like she had made any friends. It made him feel guilty, leaving her alone in their cramped, shadowy apartment most nights while he was out having, supposedly, the time of his life, and she sat alone doing goodness knows what. For all he knew, she was crying herself to sleep in her pillow. (He had to suppress a laugh at that one.  _Riza Hawkeye? Cry? As if._ ) It was like any time he brought someone up in conversation, she never knew who they were. Sometimes he wondered if she was lying just to spite him, but, for being as much of a dumbass as he was, she never went out of her way to make him angry.

"She's having a party tonight, and I think I'm gonna go." Roy popped a piece of sweet and sour chicken into his mouth, the same offer he always had dangling silently at the end of his sentence like a carrot. But Riza Hawkeye was a carnivore, and carrots didn't excite her. He didn't know what excited her. Maybe he never would.

"Okay," Riza said, slurping down a piece of chicken.

He would have to do it fast or he would lose his nerve. So then, quickly: "Would you want to go?"

Normally she shot his offers down quickly, almost graceful in their gracelessness. Always "No," never any explanation or excuse. Simple, dry, always Riza, without ever any pretense of being anybody else. He had no idea what it was like to never feel the need to play at being someone other than who you are.

But something that night was different. Maybe it was the way that no one had really accepted that summer was over, not even the trees. People were still prone to hedonism and poor decisions and cut-offs, and the gin still ran clear and cold as spring water.. Maybe he would never know why, but after a moment's consideration--short, quiet, as if she were running through a mental calendar that, for all Roy knew, could be cluttered with dates with people that he had never seen--she shrugged and said "Sure," before munching crisply on a bamboo shoot. 

He waited for the catch, but none came. That was the thing with her; you would always think you had her figured out, and then she would surprise you, again and again. Even now, after years of knowing her, he was struck with the feeling that he didn't know her at all.

And so while Riza changed into something a bit more party-appropriate, Roy dug around in the freezer and pulled out half a bottle of vodka that Christmas had bought him the last time he had been home ("You know the rules," Christmas said, handing him the bottle. "Just don't be stupid," Roy quoted, wearing the shit-eating grin he had learned from her.) and mixed up two screwdrivers. When Riza returned from her room wearing a simple, dark-blue skirt and white tank top, looking surprisingly game, he handed her the glass, and she knocked it back in two long swigs.

"Are you feeling alright?" he asked, locking her eyes, which were now shining like brass lamps with the alcohol.

"Believe me," she said, rolling her shoulders, as if she were feeling stiff. "You wouldn't want me at this party if I were sober." She held up the now-empty glass. "Another, please."

By the time they got to Rebecca's apartment--situated snugly in a bustling neighborhood of Aerugan immigrants, near where her parents lived--Roy found that, for once, he had to keep up with Riza. They hadn't drank together enough times at this point for him to get a good read on her tolerance, and he couldn't tell, as they sat silent and stiff-backed on the Tunnel, if she was drunk or not. He was buzzed, and well on his way to drunk. Once they climbed the three flights of stairs to Rebecca's apartment, music seeping out from the crack under the door like smoke, Riza wore the same unreadable expression she always did, a Xerxian marble statue of a girl.

It was Rebecca herself who answered the door, smelling of perfume and weed and beer, hair billowing around her shoulders like clouds of chocolate mousse. "Oh hey, Hawkeye!"

Riza smiled the small, soft smile she used for adults, a deceptive toddler of a smile, one that would, unless you knew her, never let you know that she didn't want to be there. But, despite the name not ringing any bells over dinner, Riza had a sharp brain, and Roy could watch as the gears began to knit together. "Hey, Catalina."

"Fancy meeting you here," Rebecca said, leaning liquidly on the doorframe, beer bottle sitting precariously between fore- and middle fingers like a cigarette. Rebecca's large, brown eyes slid over to catch Roy. The strange look that she gave them both, Roy had gotten used to by now. "And Roy Mustang. Are you two together or...?"

"Old friends," Riza said before Roy could get the chance. He was already gearing up for a lengthy and charming explanation when she did that, and a startled burst of air fell from between his lips upon being beaten to the punch. Riza opened up her satchel and pulled out the remains of the bottle of vodka, holding it up for Rebecca's inspection. "Is there somewhere I can put this?"

Roy found himself impressed. Riza Hawkeye wasn't awkward at all. In fact, she was remarkably good at these post-adolescent games. The easiest way to quell questions and gain entrance into a party is to bring booze. Roy hadn't even noticed she had nabbed it. Clever girl.

"Oh, yeah, totally!" Rebecca moved heavily out of the doorway, ushering them inside of small, warmly-lit apartment. There was a cluster of kids that Roy recognized passing a joint in front of an open window, and several more clustered, deep in thought, around a record player. Rebecca placed a sisterly hand on the back of Riza's shoulder in the same touchy way all drunk girls do, guiding her to an ersatz card table piled high with booze. Roy followed at their heels, for once unsure of his footing.

Rebecca was a bright and informative host though, and made it very difficult for anyone to feel awkward. "There  _was_ someone who was DJ-ing, but I think he got too stoned and fell asleep in my bathroom." Her laugh warbled like an early-morning bird. Roy didn't know her very well, only hearing stories from his own friends, but he was appraising her with a jeweler's eye. Would it be impolite to sleep with the host of a party you hadn't been invited to? Would you have to stay over? "But over  _there_ ," she pointed with a lithe foot. "There's tons of snacks people brought over. Someone even made a quiche." She exchanged a glance with Riza and shrugged:  _What the fuck, amirite?_ Roy decided to write off Rebecca as a potential conquest. From the way things were going, Riza would have more luck getting her into bed.

That thought gave him pause. He realized, then, that the topic of sexual orientation had never come up between them. It was always assumed, at least for Dr. Hawkeye, that Roy posed a potential threat to the Hawkeye daughter's chastity, but her skills with firearms aside, that never seemed to be an issue. Even with their close quarters, Roy never once saw the same things behind her eyes in her that he saw in other girls, especially once he started to grow into his ego a little more. Maybe she was gay, or bi, or asexual, or simply didn't care. Maybe it was none of his business, and he should find whoever brought that bottle of tequila and acquire a shot glass.

Riza and Rebecca, bizarrely, became fast friends, and Roy found himself watching their interactions out of the corner of his eye and assessing them the same way he would if Rebecca or Riza had been a guy: Is that hand on the knee friendly or suggestive? Is Rebecca laughing a little  _too_ much at what Riza is saying? (Riza did have a whip-smart sense of humor, when it showed itself, and it always had the habit of catching people off-guard, which made it twice as funny.) Do girls  _always_ sit their faces so close together when they're talking?

Eventually the two left the apartment under the pretense of having a cigarette, or at least Rebecca did. Roy knew enough about Riza to know that she found cigarettes repulsive, and she always looked at him with an almost maternal kind of disappointment whenever he bought them on their weekly grocery trips. His entertainment for the past half hour gone, Roy decided to actually enjoy the party himself, and he moved to the snack table. There was one slice of quiche left and, in his drunken state, that sounded absolutely  _sublime_. But, as he reached for it, he found another hand getting it before he had the chance. Following the hand to an arm, and then the arm to a torso, and then the torso to a face, Roy found himself looking at a tall, skinny guy in a purple v-neck shirt, long-sleeved despite the weather, with dark hair, rectangular glasses, and bright green eyes.

"Sorry, I was gonna take that," Roy said, taken a bit aback. This guy was obviously older than most of the kids in Rebecca's apartment and was the kind of handsome that made Roy particularly self-conscious of how not-straight he was. He always knew he was bisexual, but it was the sort of thing that never came up in conversation, least of all with Riza Hawkeye. Christmas knew, but it had been a non-issue with her. When Roy had told her, she had simply patted him on the shoulder and said "Roy-boy, I run a brothel. It would take a lot more than that to surprise me." But never, really, had he met a man who looked like  _this_ _guy_ , who made his throat run dry, and made him feel at once too young and too old to be feeling like this. It was an odd set of emotions because, also, this guy was grabbing his quiche. He had claimed that quiche, silently, with his eyes from across the room, and didn't think he would have to fight someone for it, let alone a guy so handsome he sort of wanted to punch himself in the face.

The guy blinked for a second before letting his mouth slide into an easy, sideways grin. Roy contemplated jumping from the fire escape, because he could tell that he was well and supremely fucked.  _Hopefully_ , he thought, and then immediately went bright red for it. "Oh come on, quiche is my  _favorite_."

"Quiche also happens to be  _my_ favorite," Roy said, laying a proprietary hand on the small, plastic plate. This was a lie, but he found that he would make up much more fantastic things in order to prolong this very bizarre, very banal conversation.

"Well, isn't that coincidental?" the guy asked, teeth and eyes bright in the buttery light of Rebecca's apartment. There was a string of fairy lights hanging on one wall, over the open window. "Of all the apartments in all of Central City, Rebecca Catalina's happens to have what are probably the only two people in Amestris whose favorite food is quiche."

"Funny how those things works, huh?" Roy said, trying to imitate the way this guy's smile was so simple, so unaffected. He felt like he was smiling for a picture, and that he wasn't doing so convincingly.

"You could say that," the guy said, adjusting his glasses with the hand that wasn't currently holding onto a small, plastic plate of quiche. "I'm Maes, by the way. Maes Hughes."

"Hi, Maes-by-the-way-Maes-Hughes," Roy said, trying to be funny. Either it worked or he was incredibly awkward and Maes-by-the-way-Maes-Hughes was laughing at his gaffe, and he found that, either way, he didn't care. "I'm Roy Mustang." And then, Roy Mustang attempted to shake his hand, with his right hand, which was holding the plate of quiche, and it fell to the floor, right onto Rebecca Catalina's carpet.

It was neither the most illustrious, nor the most romantic start to a relationship, but it was a start nonetheless. He didn't sleep with Maes that night, because at that point Maes was pretty sure he was straight, and Roy was scared shitless of messing this up, whatever "this" was. But he did stay out most of the night, after cleaning up the mess on Rebecca's floor and splitting the rest of the bottle of tequila with his new friend. They ended up at a 24-hour diner, and they split an omelette and drank coffee like it wasn't two in the morning and they hadn't just met. Only after they started dating would Roy realize quite how  _gay_ that was, at which point Maes would poke him in the ribs, where he knew Roy was ticklish, and correct him "Quite how  _bi_ that was."

"Quiche isn't actually my favorite," Roy would say after that, and Maes would laugh, a sound like hot chocolate on a snow day, like riding in the backseat of a car in the rain.

"Yeah, I know. But you were cute, so I didn't call you out on it."

Roy would also learn, later, that Riza had spent the rest of the night with Rebecca, who vomited on the street while trying to smoke a cigarette, and then slept the rest of the night in her bed, trying to make sure she didn't have alcohol poisoning. He wouldn't learn, however, that he hadn't been making things up. Rebecca did, indeed, try to kiss her, and Riza, drunk and confused herself, let her. She would never bring it up again, not with anyone, and  that memory would find itself sorted into the ever-growing file of Things That Riza Hawkeye Has Never Truly Dealt With.

"Mustang."

He doesn't even have the energy to jump when Armstrong addresses him in the locker room. Armstrong always looks like a comic book superhero in his plug suit, muscles ripplingly almost hilariously, but there is nothing funny about him right now. His blue eyes are flat and steely, and he finds that, without his usual sanguine nature, his mustache gave him a menacing, silent-film-villain quality. He looks almost like his sister.

"Oh, sorry. Zoned out, I guess." Armstrong only nodded, and began to walk to the door, not bothering to hold the door open for him, in what must be the Armstrong family equivalent of calling someone an asshole.

Alex Louis Armstrong is mad at him. He didn't know that Alex Louis Armstrong was even  _capable_ of being mad at someone, and he is mad at him. Unsure of why he was invited to do so, Roy had helped Gracia make Maes's funeral arrangements. If there had been any doubt before whether or not Gracia was fond of him, those doubts were wiped clean when, upon showing up at their townhouse two days after Maes's death, he had been greeted by a surprisingly bone-crushing hug, and a few clear, makeup-less tears wept into his shoulder. After a few moments standing like this, with Elicia peering at them warily from inside, she had released him, sniffling and wiping her eyes, wearing a small, tired smile like mourning weeds.

"The gang's all here," she had said limply, and Roy felt something in his heart die a little.

The decision had been partly his, partly Gracia's, and partly Hawkeye's, but as far as Armstrong was concerned, it was a Roy Mustang (TM) operation alone, and he was more than happy to shoulder the blame. They had decided, last minute, not to invite the Elrics to the funeral. In fact, it went much further than that; they weren't invited to the funeral, and, ultimately, were never informed of Hughes's death at all. There were many reasons for this, not the least of which being the fact that Edward already had a lot on his plate, and didn't know Hughes all that well. They would find out eventually, of course, but not right now. Not when Roy can't think straight, and can't look Hawkeye in the eye, and Ed is still recovering from the sortie with Lust. Later, tomorrow, next week, next year, any time,  _any time_ , but now.

Armstrong was less than pleased with this decision when everyone in the Program was informed. The reaction overall was mixed. Oddly, and perhaps only to exist in opposition to her brother, Olivier was proud of him, saying that grief would be an unnecessary distraction a still-fledgling pilot. But Alex was furious, calling him cruel.

"We all loved Mr. Hughes," he had said, looking down the considerable distance between their heights. "They deserve to know."

And they do. He can't disagree with Armstrong there. And he knows that the reason he hasn't told them is because he can't. He already is having enough issues adjusting to the death of his friend himself, so how could he look three children in the eye and say those horrible words "Maes Hughes is dead"?

"You think you're doing them a service," Armstrong had said, voice rich and dark as crushed velvet coffin lining. "But you aren't. You're being cruel, Mustang, and I think you know that."

Of course he knows that. No one in the world knows more about the cruelty of Roy Mustang than Roy Mustang. Anyone else who would have been better informed is dead now.

Outside the locker room, Ed is sitting, bored, in a chair, fiddling with his phone. His feet don't quite touch the ground, the toes of his shoes brushing the floor gently. Seeing Mustang walk past, he hops out of the chair and begins to follow the older pilots into the observation deck for testing.

"Why the long face, Mustang?" he asks, looking at him expectantly, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

"I have no idea what you mean, Fullmetal," Mustang says, for once feeling claustrophobic and small in his plug suit.

"It's a  _joke_ ," Ed says, as if explaining some hip new fad that all the cool kids know about but Mustang is simply too old to get it. "You know, horses have long faces, and mustangs are a type of horse..." He looks up at Roy, expecting something. Maybe not approval--if he's looking for approval, the kid knows well enough by now to look elsewhere--but something, recognition perhaps. Ed's a smart kid, and he's noticed the shift at HQ whether anyone has told him or not. He's going out of his way to engage Roy, which only serves to make him more guilty, particularly after the uncomfortably somber ride to HQ that morning. For not the first time, he wants to reach down and grip Ed by his skinny shoulders and shake him, to say "Do you have any idea what you have gotten yourself into? This is bigger than us, and it has cost me the life of my best friend, and you are standing there, unaware, making crummy jokes. How must it feel for someone who has spent so much of his life being told how smart he is to be so amazingly ignorant?"

But he doesn't. He just keeps walking and says "That's a terrible joke, Fullmetal."

"You just have no sense of humor."

"You know what? You're probably right." In the whole time they have known each other, in the whole time they have spent sharing Hawkeye, greedy satellites around a bright but overworked star, this may be the only concession he has ever made to him. For once in his life, Edward Elric finds himself to be speechless.

They walk by Hawkeye, conversing sharply with Havoc and Fuery. As they pass, Hawkeye's words shrivel on her lips and her eyes catch Roy's like a hawk descending upon a rabbit, and for a moment they are trapped, both complicit in the merciful game of cruelty they are playing.

* * *

The morning after being informed of the death of Lieutenant Colonel Hughes (promoted past her in death to brigadier general, a gesture she is sure he would have found hilarious, since he hadn't done a single thing of military consequence since Ishval), Captain Hawkeye stands before her, a kid standing beside her who can't be substantially older than the Elrics, hands on hips clothed in a pair of tight jeans and a tank top.

Olivier scans her friend's face, trying to understand the inconclusive expression resting on it, but she can't. The usually clear pond of Hawkeye's face has been muddied by the death of Lieutenant Colonel Hughes, and she can't divine what she's thinking anymore. The only thread she can pick out is  _confused_ , which she can understand completely.

"You haven't acquired another pilot, have you?" she asks. Her hand twitches for her knife and she can't explain why.

"This is Invidia," Hawkeye says. Something here isn't right. She remembers, even with the somewhat turbulent introduction that the Elrics had, even despite the fact that Hawkeye is neither the warmest nor the most maternal, there had always been a hand on the shoulder, a smile, something, but Hawkeye is standing probably half a foot away from the kid, as if they were magnets of the same polarity. "They're our new intern."

Olivier doesn't ever remember them having interns. It doesn't make sense in a military context, not even with the Program being the bizarre nexus of military, science, engineering, and diplomacy that it is. 

Olivier's brow furrows. "Intern?" Interns are the kind of thing that magazines and social media startups have, not military organizations.

"It was the General's idea," Riza supplies by way of an explanation, but that only serves to make Olivier more confused as to why this spiky-haired teenager is standing in jeans and a tank top  _i_ _n Olivier's headquarters_ , where, technically, there is no dress code, but where everyone, Elric included, at least somewhat tries to look decent. Especially if this were the General's idea, she should know about it. She is the General's second in command. Why he would play hopscotch with the chain of command and inform the Captain before her--even though the Captain is, technically, in charge of personnel--doesn't make sense to her. She's slightly offended. "He thought the Program could do with a PR boost. After the sortie with Lust, public opinion is..." The Captain clears her throat. "Low."

"So of course we should hire an intern," Olivier says crisply.

Olivier knows that she's being insubordinate, but she also knows that there's little the Captain can do about it, even if she wanted to, which she doubts that she does. Hawkeye's one main fault is that her allegiances are illogical. She's more likely to make sacrifices for a friend than for a superior, and Olivier worries that one day it'll get her hurt, or court-martialed. "The General said this would be a sign of us 'reaching out to the community.'" Olivier doesn't want to reach out to the community. She wants to make sure that there is a community to reach out to, so that someone who isn't her, maybe someone with a liberal-arts degree, can figure out how to do that once they all haven't been killed by giant monsters.

Olivier shifts her eyes to the kid--Invidia, a funny name, one she hasn't heard before--and fights a sudden and inexplicable wave of nausea. The A/C has been acting up for the last week or so, and so the inside of HQ feels swampy and tepid. She misses Briggs, the way the air was always clean and cold, even in the middle of summer. Or, at least it was, before Greed melted the Drachman ice caps and threw the whole world into a state of ecological panic. Now Briggs is a swamp, brackish water and flooded taiga, the winters a lukewarm imitation of what they used to be. Olivier can take punches like a boxing champion, and no longer flinches at knife wounds, but she got heat stroke her first week in Central, and with the A/C on the fritz, she feels uncomfortably woozy, as if she might faint like a woman of her breeding and station who isn't an Armstrong. Armstrong women don't faint.

"Invidia," Olivier says, swiping a hand across the back of her neck. "That's an interesting name."

"Aerugan," the intern explains. And then, with a curl along their lip as if this whole situation is dreadfully funny, adds "On my mother's side."

Olivier doesn't trust easily, and she knows that there are often very good reasons as to why someone would lie about their name, but she doesn't like being lied to. The kid's suspicious face aside, the mention of being half-Aerugan is plausible. They have the fair skin of anyone north of the Aerugan border and west of the Ishvalan, but the dark hair consistent with being at least partially Aerugan. The odd colored eyes don't add up, though. Olivier doesn't know of anywhere in the world where someone would be born with purple eyes.

But, as much as she wants to press it, she knows when she has been outranked and outmatched; this is an order directly from the General, and Olivier knows little to nothing about Aerugo. She may as well be arguing with the word of God.  "Whatever," she says. "At least it means I'm no one's tea girl anymore. Go make us some tea, intern. Iced."

"Yes ma'am," says Invidia.

"Sir," Olivier corrects, turning on her heels. "Does anyone have a goddamn hair tie in this place?"

Once Olivier turns a corner and disappears from view, Riza says "She grows on you."

"I should probably get started on that tea," Invidia says, "or there will be nothing left of me for her to grow onto."

"That's probably for the best."

* * *

While his skills in Alchemist repair are below that of Ross and Catalina, Denny Brosh is actually quite skilled at maintaining plug suits. In fact, his skill is so far above that of his two fellow engineers that, if anything with the plug suits and their corresponding paraphernalia goes wrong, Ross and Catalina don't bother trying anymore, just calling for Brosh directly.

They started Winry off doing plug suit maintenance with Brosh, but it soon turned out that Winry is lost with anything that isn't made of metal, and Brosh is a terrible teacher. He's never been the most eloquent, something that Ross likes to make fun of him for, and when Winry asked him what exactly plug suits are for, he just shrugged and said "Something with sync rates? I think? They're not technically necessary, but we need them, so..." His answer trailed off from there and was never heard from again, replaced with a noncommittal hand wave.

From that day forward, Winry was transferred to working with Ross and Catalina, which was a much better fit.

As plug suits themselves are very rarely damaged, most of the work done on them is experimentation to try and make them better and more effective for their work with "something with sync rates." After the sortie with Lust, where not one but two pilots' sync rates dropped dramatically, this was, for once, a top priority. No one could tell if this was exciting for Brosh or if he was on the edge of a nervous breakdown, although, for him, both of those states look pretty similar. 

Mustang is sitting on a work bench while Brosh is tinkering with his headband, the one all the pilots have to wear with their plug suits. He had always thought it was some sort of bizarre aesthetic choice, that maybe whoever designed the Alchemists watched a bit too much Macross as a child, but listening to Brosh haphazardly toss around explanations, they do apparently have something to do with sync rates. Mustang has a head for science, always has, but trying to grasp the ways the Alchemists work has been like trying to repair a car. He may have the head for it, but he doesn't have the hands.

"We don't want another sortie like the last one," Brosh says, using an suspiciously simple looking screwdriver to tinker with the headband, the two little metallic cat ears that supposedly hook up his brain with the brain of a metal giant.

"You've got that right," Mustang says, chin in palm, remembering absently the way he had felt his heart be harpooned, even as his own chest remained intact.  _Slightly poetic,_ he muses.  _A homunculus named Lust attacked my heart. There's probably something symbolic there._ It seems appropriate that he should be felled by lust.

"...and this is the engineering department." An entirely different--or perhaps not that different at all--pain shoots through his heart as he hears the doors to the elevator slide open and the voice of the Captain tumble out. He tries to arch his back and make himself smaller, but Hawkeye's eyesight has always been uncannily keen, and he knows that no amount of hiding will keep him hidden. "Primarily, this is used for maintenance: of the Alchemists, the plug suits, the SAGE system's computers, anything. We've got some of the best engineers in the world working here."

Brosh preens, a girlish blush sweeping his cheeks. "Aw, thanks, Captain!"

Either Hawkeye doesn't feel like acknowledging Brosh's obvious pride at her compliment, or she's too busy showing whoever she has with her around, and so she simply ignores it. "I doubt you'll be here too much, honestly."

"Good, it's really hot in here." Mustang recognizes the voice, slightly nasal, from somewhere, but he can't really peg it down, and doesn't want to turn and face the Captain to find out.

"Yeah," the Captain agrees. "Our A/C has been on the fritz for the past few days, but it tends to be pretty stuffy down here regardless."

Lucky for Mustang, he's in his plug suit, which is specifically designed to be made of a breathable material in order to allow the PSL as much contact with his skin as possible, and so he doesn't feel the full extent of the heat, but even he can't ignore the fact that all of HQ, not just the engineering garage, has been particularly hot as of late.

"I guess it's a good thing I brought tea, then," says the other person brightly, and Mustang jolts slightly at the heavy plastic  _thunk_ of a pitcher of a iced tea being placed on a work table. Mustang looks up at the person who has brought it, no longer able to avoid it politely, and realizes where he had heard the voice before. The person had been a waiter at the restaurant where he had gotten brunch with Maes the morning after his birthday, the day he--

"Mustang, Brosh, this is our new intern, Invidia."

"Intern?" Brosh asks, not looking up from his work.

"General's orders," Hawkeye says, as if that somehow makes this make any more sense, which it doesn't. "We're still trying to figure out what to do with them, but I figured since it's so hot in here, the least we can do is make them bring everyone some tea."

"Can't argue with that logic," says Brosh with a smile.

"I'll go find some cups," Hawkeye says, and walks off in the direction of the engineers' break room.

Mustang would like to sigh in relief at the fact that he doesn't have to confront the feeling of guilt gnawing at his spine that Hawkeye makes him feel, but there's a different feeling chomping at his insides that he can't shake, and it centers on their new intern.

"This is probably a kind of bizarre question," Mustang begins. "But did you used to be a waiter?"

The question doesn't ruffle the intern at all, and they slide slickly into an explanation: "You know how being a college student is," they say, purple eyes glistening. "Money's tight, and I need to work as much as I can."

"But you don't get paid for being an intern, do you?" Mustang asks. "Isn't that kind of the point of being an intern?"

They blink, lids heavy and reptilian, and say "I've gotta pad my résumé too, you know. The job market is pretty crazy right now."

He supposes that's true. He had never had to do anything like that, of course, because of Christmas's money and because a research assistantship with the illustrious, late Dr. Berthold Hawkeye made his CV look leagues better than most of his competitors, but he supposes that the intern is probably right. He just can't decide what they could possibly want to do that would require an internship with the State Alchemist Program.

Before he can think about it too much, Hawkeye returns with two cups, each filled to the brim with ice cubes. Invidia, with all the practiced grace of seasoned waitstaff, carefully pours Brosh and Mustang each a cup of tea and hands it to them.

"Thank you," Mustang says, taking his. His throat is parched, but he doubts that some iced tea would be able to fix it.

"Alright, here you go," Brosh says, handing him the headband, fully tinkered-with. It looks no different than it had before, but even if it did, Mustang isn't sure he'd be able to tell. The things look stupid and mess up his hair, but if they're necessary, they're necessary, and there's nothing he can do about that.

"Thanks, Brosh, I appreciate it." He slides the headband indelicately into his hair (grimacing only slightly when it messes up his already artfully-mussed aesthetic), downs his glass of tea in one, and then bolts for the elevator. If anyone asks, he will say that the engineering department is unbearable airless, which it is, and that he needs to head up top to get air, or to run some tests, or--

A hand intrudes gently between the swiftly closing elevator doors, only an inch or two from kissing together, causing the doors to reopen to allow its owner in. The Captain bears no mark of being aware that anything is off, face perfectly placid. She glides silently into the cramped cube of the elevator and takes her place, back soldier-straight, next to him, eyes staring bullet holes through the doors. 

Mustang swallows thickly, mind going through the card catalogue of the things he could say--or could avoid saying--quickly, only to be interrupted by the elevator skidding to a jarring stop and the red emergency lights coming on.

* * *

Havoc was in the middle of breaking his high score in the Alchemist simulator (which has no score function and is not supposed to be used on personal computers, but Havoc is good with computers and has a lot of free time) when the power goes out. He had spent a probably disordinate amount of time on the sprite for Lust, but he hadn't gotten to design video game boobs since college, and so when the whole thing crashes, he lets out a string of curses, which, thankfully, does not seem out of place considering the power had just gone out, and attracts no more than the usual amount of attention that Havoc cursing does.

Olivier, who has found a remarkable amount of her duties to be taken over by the Program's new intern (Havoc can't complain; it's pretty nice to have a teenager bringing him iced tea when he's thirsty; no one's done that since he still lived with his sisters down South), had been sitting in the observation bay with them, looking imperious and bored. At the power going out, she bolts upright, knocking her chair aside.

"What just happened?" she demands.

"Well, it looks like the power went out," Havoc supplies.

Olivier's glare could cut glass. "Can someone who  _isn't_ an idiot explain what's going on?"

"According to the SAGE system," Falman states, "only 1.2 percent of our circuits are functioning."

"That's impossible," Olivier says, but doesn't dwell on it. Obviously it  _isn't_ impossible, or it wouldn't be happening. "What about the backup circuits?"

Falman frowns. "No, the backup circuits aren't working."

"Fantastic," Olivier snaps. "Well, let's just hope that the universe doesn't hate us too much, because this would be an eerily perfect moment for a homunculus to strike."

"With all due respect, sir," Falman says. "Please don't say that."

"Connect all remaining circuits to the SAGE, Falman," Olivier orders. "In case something does happen, we need to be prepared."

"What about providing power to the Alchemists?" 

"We don't need to waste the power on them if we don't need to," Olivier explains. "How many circuits is 1.2 percent, anyway?"

Falman looks conciliatory as he says "Nine."

"Out of how many?"

"2,567."

"Excellent." She rights her chair and sinks back into it. She still hasn't found a hair tie, and her hair--luscious and gold, the pride of the Armstrong family--sits as heay on her head as a mantle. The heat is getting to her, making her feel sick and snappish, which just means that of course, of fucking _course_ , this has to happen now. "Falman, rout the remaining circuits to the SAGE, and somebody find that goddam intern so they can get me a fucking hair tie. It feels like Ishval in here."

"Oh, there's one more thing," Falman says. "Well, two, actually."

"This day just can't get any better. What is it?"

"The first is that the A/C is definitely dead now, since there's no power, meaning that it'll only get hotter in here."

"Wonderful. And the second thing?"

"According to the SAGE, there's an elevator that got stuck during the power outage. It was leaving the engineering department, and from the weight reading, there are two people inside." Falman scratches the back of his head nervously. "And, judging by everyone I see here, I would hazard a guess that it's the Captain and Mustang."

"Hm." Olivier steeples her fingers. "Well, that certainly makes this more interesting, doesn't it?"

* * *

"So, I've got good news and bad news," Riza says after prying open the elevator doors only to be faced with concrete elevator shaft in all directions.

"Bad news first," Mustang says.

"The bad news is, we're stuck, and I'm going to wager that pressing the emergency button won't do anything, since it looks like the power is out."

"Excellent, I've always dreamed of being stuck in an elevator with a beautiful woman."

"The good news is," Riza says, ignoring his poorly-timed joke, "since we're stuck in here, we're probably safe from whatever it is out there that caused this to happen."

"What do you mean?" Mustang asks.

"How much do you know about Central Headquarters?"

He isn't sure when the tables turned this way, when it stopped being him teaching her things and started being the other way around. It wasn't when she became his superior; it started long before that. Mustang has no sleeves to hide aces in, but Riza always quietly knows things, and that makes her dangerous. He expected to sweep into her life like a traveling merchant, bearing shiny things from faraway places, but she's never been as impressed with him as he expected. He's always been impressed with her, though, from the very start, impressed with her square shoulders and her unbending loyalty and her occasional, small smiles that are so overwhelming in their warmth and kindness that he wonders what he did to deserve it. From his position sitting cross-legged on the floor of the elevator, he wonders if this is how she felt when he padded downstairs from her father's study after breaking in to snoop through his research, ready to drop a bomb on her that she wasn't altogether surprised to see.

"Not as much as you do, I'm guessing."

Riza sits on the floor across from him, back flush with the cool, metal wall. "I would bet that's not true."

"What would you bet?" he asks. He's never been one for gambling, but he's always loved a good bet. Havoc is at least 10,000  _cenz_ in debt to him, but he's fairly sure both of them know he'll never collect on it. Betting against Havoc is almost unfairly easy at this point.

"A lot, actually," Riza says. "After all, you do have quite a few heavily classified files at your apartment."

 _So that's how she's going to play it, then_ , he thinks _._ "So you did see them, after all."

"Of course I saw them," she says. "But we're not talking about your unhealthy obsession with Kimblee right now." Even though her words sting him a bit as they pass, he's glad that he doesn't have to have that particular uncomfortable conversation, especially when he can't run away. 

"Then what  _are_ we talking about?"

"Why the State Alchemist Program exists," Riza says. "Or, at least part of it. As you might imagine, it's complicated."

"Enlighten me, then."

"Underneath Central HQ is a city," she says.

It sounds like the start of a particularly bizarre scary story which, giving the reddish glow of the emergency lights, seems apt.

"A city?"

She nods. "More or less, it's a scaled-down version of Central City. It's called Central-2. It's the most secure part of the whole base, and always has at least some power source running. It was designed to be a self-sufficient colony, even if isolated from the outside, so that if this whole thing goes south--like, really south, to the point where above ground is no longer habitable--whoever is down here will survive and..." She tips her head back, looking up at the ceiling of the elevator. He imagines her standing on his shoulders and climbing out the emergency hatch, shimmying up the cable to freedom, like a rope in gym class. She could do it, too; she has the upper-body strength to put most of them to shame. "And will be able to carry on humanity if the rest of the world is destroyed."

"That sounds a little apocalyptic, no?"

Riza's eyes lower to his again, a ruddy brown in the emergency lights. "I mean, you've seen what they can do. And I'm not just talking about the homunculi; the Alchemists are just as much a threat to the safety of the world as the homunculi are at this point, because we're not very good at controlling them, and there's always the possibility they'll control us."

"All hail our robot overlords," Mustang jokes, and Riza, for once, lets out a small bark of a laugh. He would almost feel gratified by it if the topic of their conversation wasn't so grim. He wishes they didn't have to be trapped in an elevator talking about the end of the world for him to be able to make her laugh.

"Pretty much. But look at it this way," she says, cracking a small, wry smile. "If the homunculi don't kill you first, if the end of the world comes, you'll probably be safe."

He had almost forgotten they did this. But Hawkeye does have a sense of humor, dry and scorching as the desert between Ishval and Xing, and with his own urbane witticisms, they have an odd kind of back-and-forth that they either haven't indulged in a while. He misses her laugh the way he misses the fall and the way leaves crunch under your feet.

"It makes you wonder though," Mustang says, extending his cramped legs so that they end beside Hawkeye's hip. "If this place is connected to something so important, how would the power go out?"

"That's what I'm trying to figure out. There are three main circuits in Central HQ: main, sub, and reserve. Theoretically, it's impossible for all to be blown at once."

"Obviously it's not  _that_ impossible."

She presses a hand against the gun on her thigh. She doesn't grasp it, or pull it out of its holster; she just places her hand against its barrel, flat, as if waking up in the middle of the night and reassuring herself that her partner was still sleeping beside her. "Obviously. Which means that someone must have blown the circuits intentionally."

"So you mean..."

She nods. "Someone has broken into Central HQ."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is the first half of a line from "I Will Bury You in Time," by Neutral Milk Hotel
> 
> This is the first part of another two-parter, meaning that another mise en abyme chapter will be between this one and the second half.
> 
> Also this chapter and the contiguous one following this are almost entirely based off of episode 11 of Eva, which you should all go watch, because it is a delight.


	12. Mise en abyme II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Slight TW in this chapter for jokes about suicide. There aren't many of them, but they are there. Also TW for violence against animals, but it's metaphorical dream violence, so take that as you will.

_Five years ago._

Roy Mustang is used to a certain degree of desolation. He had to be, living with the Hawkeyes like he did. The Hawkeyes were, he supposes, a family of once-great repute, and their home was probably quite grand in its heyday, but when he got there the thing was falling to shambles. The only thing that kept it from careening off the mountain was Riza's single-handed and single-minded determination to keep it upright. He wonders, occasionally, looking at her doing target practice or commanding troops, what kind of amazing things she would have been able to accomplish had she not had her childhood taken from her by her parents, what kind of dazzling child prodigy she could have been. Or maybe not; maybe she would have applied that same sort of clear sight to being the most normal, average child you had ever seen, a perfect statistical median, overwhelming in her ordinariness. As much as he knows this isn't fair to her, he's glad she turned out the way she did. If she hadn't, the world would be in even worse shape than it is already in.

But Ishval is completely different. There was something particularly aristocratic, almost elegant, about the Hawkeye house's decay. It was some kind of mountain House of Usher, a haunted house without any ghosts, but just as haunted all the same. It was desolate in abundance: the extensive garden in the back (probably planted by some dewy-eyed Hawkeye wife sometime in the last century) had been left to seed probably before Berthold Hawkeye was ever born, and it always looked like it was just waiting for a signal to consume the house. There was a large tree in the front that hadn't been trimmed in decades, and every time there was a storm it always looked on the brink of tipping over and falling right on the house.

(Roy had fond memories of that tree when it wasn't a continual source of anxiety. It's highest bough was right outside the window of the room that he slept in, and through some careful climbing, he could shimmy down the tree and out into the night to commit the underwhelming debauchery that was at his disposal in the middle of the Western mountains. There was really only so much he could get up to, but Riza was always there in the kitchen when he got back, slim shoulders straight as a ruler. She never said whether she was waiting up for him or not, and he never asked, but he liked knowing that someone may have been worried about him. He was so used to being worried about back home, and so moving to live with the Hawkeyes and finding that his teacher hardly cared about him at all and that his teacher's daughter was also unimpressed was a hard transition to make.)

But where the Hawkeye house was slowly being consumed by nature, Ishval is being consumed by the absence of it. There is nothing for hundreds and hundreds of miles in every direction, only sand. Roy knows this, because they flew in at night, and from the air, the dark expanse of desert looked like the ocean, deep blue and endless. This is made all the worse whenever a sandstorm kicks up and the sand rearranges itself into new dunes, occasionally showing what was there before. The desert wasn't always a total wasteland. Under the sand are the ruins of what used to be Ishvalan cities and towns. Whenever they get dredged up, they always send someone to look through them, and find all of them to be exactly the same: almost completely intact, edges buffeted down smooth and shining because of the sand, and completely empty of anything, including bodies. They had shown up expecting carnage, and instead found what looked more like the ruins of Xerxes.

Because that's how Gluttony works. They haven't yet seen it in person, but a few tech-savvy Ishvalans managed to snap some grainy cell phone videos and pictures and uploaded them to the internet, causing widespread panic and anger, particularly at the Amestrian military's inaction. What they've been able to tell from these (and the added commentary that has gone up on various homunculus conspiracy forums from other eyewitnesses who managed to escape unharmed), Gluttony opens up like a whirlpool on the ground, appearing as a giant eye wreathed with large teeth instead of eyelashes, swallowing up everything, occasionally up to a five mile radius of destruction, except for buildings, which remain, bizarrely, unharmed. The death toll is in the low thousands already, and Gluttony has only been wreaking havoc for a handful of days. Captain Hawkeye did everything she could to get them mobilized faster, but they have a lot of equipment and a lot of personnel, and that takes a while. She's been even more distant and diligent since they've been here.

The problem with their operation is that Gluttony isn't exhibiting any of the signs of the presence of a homunculus that they've been able to discern, and so it doesn't show up on any of their equipment, meaning that much of their job is to simply follow in its footsteps (giant-monstrous-eye-steps?) and wait. Roy had always heard stories about war being long stretches of boredom punctuated by short bursts of terror, but he never figured that the ratio would be so heavily skewed in the direction of boredom. He hasn't had this much free time since he was in college, and he has significantly less to do with it now.

There is one boon to being in the middle of Ishval, and perhaps only one. With no buildings, no people, and no lights save the ones they brought themselves, he can see the stars. He hasn't seen the stars since he lived out West, and he was too busy trying to endear himself to the Hawkeye family to care too much about them. But the sun sets early in Ishval, and he has a lot of time to sit and stare up at the sky. He's downloaded an amateur astronomy app on his phone, and has started familiarizing himself with the sky he spent most of his life being unable to see.

"What are you doing?"

Riza is staring down at him, arms crossed, the same raggedy pink cardigan she's had for as long as he's known her draped over her shoulders. It's bizarre, but the effect is slightly regal: Riza Hawkeye, Queen of the Desert, wearing her mantel of threadbare pink cashmere, her mother's, which must have, at some point, been quite lovely, but now is just another relic of the Hawkeyes' bygone status and Riza's childhood grief.

"Looking at the stars," he says. A scratchy military-issue blanket is separated his back from the sand, and if he closes his eyes he can almost pretend that he's laying on a beach down South, not looking for the monster that is intent on consuming an entire country. The last time he had been to the beach he had been with Maes. They had been on a vacation. It had been nice.

"Do you really think now is an appropriate time for stargazing?"

"It's not a question of whether it's appropriate, it's a question of 'What else would I be doing?'" Most of his hobbies aren't conducive to the Ishvalan desert. He only has cell service when connected to the wi-fi hot spot that stems from the SAGE computers that Falman brought out, and technically that is only supposed to be used for personal emergencies and military purposes. Havoc managed to bring some booze with him, since none of them were sure how long this was going to last, but he drinks like a college freshman and only deigned to bring a case of light beer that tastes like piss water. He works out, but not as obsessively as Armstrong, and he can contribute to strategy and planning, but not as well as Hawkeye. God knows what Kimblee spends his free time doing, and he would like to continue his life not knowing. And with night falling so early, he doesn't want to waste the power of their portable generators providing light to read by, so if he can't even look at the stars, what else is there for him to do?

"I suppose you have a point," she concedes.

"What are you doing out, anyway? Shouldn't you be doing something important?"

"There's only so much we can do right now since we don't know where Gluttony will strike next. My hands are tied." If Roy knows anything about Riza Hawkeye, it's that she hates feeling useless, and the way one of her boots is anxiously kneading a small hole into the sand is enough to let him know that she isn't happy. Not that any of them would be happy with this, but Hawkeye with her hands tied is a scary image. Her hands do so much to protect them and everyone else, what would they do without them? She looks down at the blanket, which is much larger than Mustang, and says "Do you care if I join you?"

"Of course not," he says, and moves over to provide her space. "Do you know anything about astronomy?"

"Not really," Hawkeye says. "It was one of the things my parents never taught me. They said it wasn't necessary." What kind of life do you have to live where you think the stars and the moon aren't necessary?

"Okay," he says, and raises an arm, pointing at a cluster of stars. "That's Andromeda. She was an ancient Cretan princess whose father tied her to a rock to sacrifice her to a sea monster and save their kingdom. But before she got eaten, Perseus flew by on a winged horse and saved her."

"Lovely," she says drily. 

Riza Hawkeye: unimpressed with the stars, unimpressed with mythology, unimpressed with him. What interests her? What spark sets the cogs of her mind to working?

He tries a different angle: "Or, let's see, you're a Taurus, right?"

"I'm a what?"

"Seriously? You don't know your zodiac sign?"

"Is that like horoscopes?"

He sighs, resting his hands on his stomach. He isn't sure why he's surprised. Horoscopes seem like something so far outside the realm of things that Hawkeye would know or care about: made-up fortune-telling based around arbitrarily-arranged constellations. What could be more un-Hawkeye than that? "Yeah, it is. Based off of your birthday, you'd be a Taurus."

"What does that mean?"

"You're a bull."

"Gee, Mustang, thanks. I always forget what a smooth-talker you are."

Roy Mustang has always been eloquent. When talking with anyone else-- _anyone else_ \--he knows this to be certain and true, but it's like as soon as she's there and there's no one else he can bounce conversation off of, his foot just magnetically finds its way into his mouth.

"No, that's not what I mean." He points up at the sky again. "Do you see that cluster of stars?"

She squints for a moment before saying "They all look the same; I don't know which ones you're pointing at."

"Can I borrow your arm for a moment?"

She looks at him like she wants to ask him a question, but instead says "Okay," and lets her left arm roll open, wrist facing the stars.

Gently, Roy grasps her wrist and directs it, left eye closed, up toward Taurus, unrolling Hawkeye's lightly clenched pointer finger with his thumb and drawing a loose circle around the constellation with it. "That's Taurus."

"That's supposed to be a bull?"

"It's abstract. You have to understand, most of these constellations are thousands of years old; at one point in time, that may have actually looked like a bull to someone."

"Okay," she says. 

He moves her hand over a little, his own fleshy astrolabe, and encircles another group of stars. "And that's Leo. That's mine." She hums in the back of her throat, an ambiguous noise that could mean appreciation, understanding, or simply acknowledging what he is saying. He wants to see her face when she looks in wonder at something, wants to see what it looks like when all the locks on her expression come undone and she looks open-faced at something.

"What's that supposed to be?"

"A lion."

"None of these look like anything."

"They don't  _have_ to, Hawkeye. We're not really being ruled by the stars, here, it's just for fun."

"That's a bizarre way to have fun."

"Well then what do  _you_ do for fun?"

"Some things will forever remain a mystery."

He wishes she were joking, but she isn't. He has known her for six years, and lived with her for four of them, but he isn't sure what she does when she's alone. When she's with him she cleans her gun or reads those trashy mystery paperbacks, but what does Riza Hawkeye do when no one is around? What parts of herself does she keep only for herself, in the sanctity of her room, where no one but Black Hayate can see them? Those pieces may as well be situated in a black hole to Roy. No light can penetrate her vastness, and so he sometimes wonders why he bothers.

Roy moves her arm again, finding another constellation. Instead of circling it, he aims her hand like a gun, as if he were shooting it down from the sky.

"What's that one?"

"Libra."

"What's it supposed to be?"

"The scales."

"Whose is that?"

"Maes's." 

She lowers her arm, his going with it, and his hand remains resting on her wrist. She doesn't shake it off, letting it perch on her sharp wrist-bones like a bird. She turns her head to look at him. In the dark, her eyes are stripped of color, but her stare is unwavering. Her look feels almost dense, as if it were actually reaching out and touching him.

"So we get to be proud and noble animals and he's stuck being a pair of scales? That doesn't seem fair."

"Look at it this way: one of us could be a goat-mermaid. Or a virgin."

"Truly lamentable fates."

It isn't wonder, the way she looks at him, but it's definitely interest. It's the same interest he sees in Fuery's eyes when he's working on his communication toys (which Roy once called "fancy walkie-talkies," and which he thought might actually make the kid cry). It's the look of someone who knows all of something's component parts, and how to take them apart, and how to put them back together again. Roy has never doubted his friendship with Hawkeye, but occasionally he wonders why they're friends in the first place. He also has no doubts that she knows just about everything about him that there is to know, but he can't imagine what parts of him compel her to stick around. She has more in common with Colonel Armstrong than she has with him, but he can't deny that, even though he knows significantly less about her than she knows about him, they have a bizarre understanding. He knows things about her that he can't articulate, and she knows more about him than she can say.

She slips her hand out of his grip and pats his arm, two small pats, direct as a knock on a door, and then gets up, walking back to her tent.

He watches her walk away, watches the tent seal itself up behind her. But light still spills out  from it even after she is gone. There are pieces of her inside that tent that he will never see, and as he stares at the boxy clump of stars that (she's right) look nothing like a bull, he tries to imagine what they are. 

He can't.

* * *

Riza thinks that it probably isn't normal to be this chummy with your ex, but she also knows that she is no expert on relationships by any optimistic stretch of the imagination, and so perhaps she is imagining things. Not that she hasn't _been_ in relationships, because she has, but this isn't how people who have broken up with each other are supposed to act, especially not when they dated for as long as Mustang and Hughes did. Riza has never resented someone for breaking up with her, but she's also never gone so far out of her way to stay their friend either.

She thinks that that is what it ultimately comes down to: Mustang is aggressively fine. "Aggressively" describes it best, because it's like he's thrusting his fine-ness under everyone's noses, like an attention-hungry child with a science project, as if his being fine were up for debate, which she supposes that it is. Mustang has always had a reputation for being a drama queen and a heartbreaker, and so those two things, when combined under the event of Mustang getting his own heart broken for a change, people expected it to blow up, and it didn't. It was like they had sat watching a bomb with a lengthy fuse as it sizzled to what was sure to be messy and destructive for everyone involved, and when the spark finally met the bomb, nothing happened. Everyone still walks on eggshells, because what if the bomb is still waiting somewhere, underneath Mustang's easy jokes and sly smiles? 

Riza has told Mustang on many occasions that he is wasted as an Alchemist pilot and should have, instead, pursued a theatrical career since he seems to be such a good (and prolific) actor, but the ruse has always been fairly obvious. His performances are always too ham-handed, a tongue-in-cheek, wink-nudge joke that she always thought everyone got, but she was wrong. For the first time, she can't tell what's under his mask, and if it looks anything like his face. For the first time, there is another layer atop Roy and Mustang and she isn't sure where it fits.

They've entered into an odd kind of ménage à trois, her and Mustang and Hughes, in everything but the conjugal sense. She's always known Hughes decently well, because he was a friend of Catalina's older brother and had graduated with him from Central U. Once he started dating Mustang she got to know him even better, but he wasn't her person to know, and so she never put in too much effort. They were background characters in the novels of each other's lives, mentioned in passing, but never driving the plot. She figured Hughes viewed her like most people who fucked Mustang did, that she may as well have been his younger sister, but now, with that bridge smoking but perhaps not burned, she thinks that may not be the case.

"More pleasurable means of suicide than drinking this surely radioactive coffee," Mustang volleys, drinking said surely radioactive coffee. "Go."

"Cyanide," Hughes offers.

"Wandering into the desert until I'm so far in that I have no means of getting back," Hawkeye says dully. The desert doesn't sit well with her, and she hasn't gotten a decent night's sleep since they got there. It's not for the nightmares, for once, but a general creeping dread and the fact that she keeps finding sand in her under-things.

"That's a good one," Hughes agrees.

"See," Mustang starts. "I was just gonna pay Hawkeye to shoot me: it'd be quick, efficient, and painless."

She shrugs. "Depends on whether or not you specified where I was to shoot you."

Mustang nods. "You make a valid point. So, how about this: point-blank range, to the head, execution style, how much would I have to pay to leave this sandy hell?"

Hughes considers for a moment before suggesting "2000 _cenz_."

Mustang puts on a good show of being very theatrically aghast. "Really? 2000 _cenz_ is all you would pay for the lifetime you would spend racked with guilt at having shot one of your closest friends and allies?"

Riza sips at her coffee which, she agrees, is pretty terrible, but she's had worse. The stuff she and her father drank when they were short on funds was worse than this. She thinks that quite a lot of coffee is worse than this, but Mustang needs something to riff on, and so here they are, contemplating economical suicide under the blazing Ishvalan sun.

"I'd do it for free," she says, feeling the coffee blaze a bitter trail down her esophagus before resting in her belly, adding bile to the already large pool of dread sitting there.

"None of you appropriately value my company," Mustang says tartly. In a flurry of kicked-up sand, Falman ducks under the tarp they have been eating their meager breakfast under, hands nervously clutching a ream of papers. "What about you, Falman?" Mustang asks, turning in his chair. "How much would you pay for the honor of shooting me in the head?"

For not the first time in his life, Falman looks olympically befuddled by Mustang, and Riza can't blame him. Especially when he's laying it on as thick as he is, he can be more than a little perplexing.

"I can't comment on that, sir." And then there was Falman's bizarre habit of calling everyone "sir" or "ma'am," even people who were technically his subordinates, like Mustang. No one was quite sure where his decorum came from. "But after some tinkering with the SAGE, we might have accurately predicted Gluttony's next move."

"How accurately?" Riza asks, all jokes for the morning dead and buried.

"Sixty-eight percent."

"That's over half," Hughes offers, knowing Riza's distaste for the SAGE and its pseudo-mystical predictions.

She doesn't like it, never has, but she knows that sitting on their asses like they are, philosophizing and sipping shitty coffee like they're still college students, isn't getting them or anyone else anywhere.

Riza pushes out her chair and stands up. "If nothing else, it'll be a change of scenery."

"Ah yes," Mustang says, leaning back in his chair, coffee cup raised primly like someone's gossipy aunt. "Trading sand for more sand."

* * *

It takes them twelve hours to pack up all of their things and people and get to the small town that the SAGE pinpointed as the most likely target for Gluttony, which is too long by Riza's standards, and she finds herself fiddling with the buckles on her satchel, a nervous tic she didn't know she had. She tries to keep her nervousness as far under wraps as she can, because she needs to be a leader. If a leader succumbs to anxiety, it's only a matter of time before the whole troupe falls after her. When they finally get to the village, Riza steps out of the jeep expecting to see destruction, carnage, anything, but instead what they see is a normal, if somewhat sleepy, Ishvalan town.

Stepping out onto the sand and casting a look around to see exactly nothing out of the ordinary, Riza shoots an incredulous look at Falman.

"Sixty-eight percent, you said?"

Falman scratches nervously at his head. "That means that there was still a thirty-two percent chance that it was wrong."

She wants to be disappointed or angry at the SAGE's shortcomings, but she can't deny the feeling of relief that is washing through her muscles at seeing nothing out of the ordinary. She knows what they need to do, but that doesn't mean she wants to do it.

The sun has already fallen, and the desert is quickly chilling. They separate, assembling tents and setting up supplies. A few curious locals have stuck their faces outside of their homes, square tenements made of light sandstone that reflect off the sunlight and look significantly more comfortable than their tents. They cast wary looks at them, conversing pointedly in Ishvalan despite the fact that they teach Amestrian in Ishvalan schools, and have for decades. They don't do the converse in Amestris, and they find themselves uncomfortably out of the loop.

"We probably don't want to know what they're saying about us," Havoc says, cigarette dangling from his lips. Even with the smoking, Havoc has the kind of muscles that come from growing up on a Southern farm, and he drives the stakes of their tents into the sand with precision and ease.

Fuery coughs nervously, carefully removing the travel tarp from the comm systems. It takes them a moment to realize that he's trying to get their attention and not just clearing sand from his throat. "I took a couple semesters of Ishvalan in college."

"Is that so?" Hughes asks. Everyone is continually impressed with the kid. He's so slight and unassuming, that when he consistently shows off his own particular brand of genius, it always comes as a pleasant surprise.

He nods. "Conversational stuff, mostly, and generally pretty old-fashioned conversation at that." He nods at a pair of Ishvalan teenage boys, who are alternating between rubber-necking at them and ducking back into their home whenever they catch anyone's eye. "Those kids are using a lot of slang, which I can't understand, but I can catch a little bit." He swipes sand off of his comm systems lovingly, as if it were a child or a pet. "They're calling us liars."

Mustang sighs, holding a cord that Riza is pulling, bringing a tent up. "What a wonderful way to begin this expedition: we're here to help them, they don't trust us, and we can't even find the thing we're supposed to be fighting."

A small chuckle drifts through the dry air like smoke. Kimblee has the tendency to disappear for stretches of time and then turn up unexpectedly, like finding a snake under a rock. For once, his customary white doesn't seem out of place, his choice of clothing not altogether different from traditional Ishvalan garb. Aside from their skin, the Ishvalan kids look no different from Amestrian kids, dressed in t-shirts and brightly colored sneakers. Upon seeing Kimblee they duck back inside and close the door behind them.

"Can you blame them?" he asks, voice smooth and cool as Xingese silk. "The most powerful country in the world turns up at your door with the most advanced weaponry ever conceived, and they're saying they're here to help you. Does nothing about that narrative seem suspect to you?"

"You seem pretty content to support that suspect narrative," Mustang says crisply.

"Oh, Mustang," Kimblee says with the exasperation of an aloof, overworked mother to her petulant toddler. "Just how much of that bright-eyed idealism is genuine and hasn't been stolen from mid-twentieth-century films?"

"They must be the same films where you got your fucking zoot suits," Mustang snaps.

Kimblee is unflappable though, and Riza could have told Mustang that there is no point in trying to argue with him. As much as he rubs Riza the wrong way, Mustang takes Kimblee's eccentricities and bizarre attitude personally. For an orphan raised in a whorehouse with suspect ancestry and a superior officer ex-boyfriend, Mustang takes the values of the Amestrian military quite seriously. In response to Mustang's jibe, Kimblee simply adjusts the fedora on his head, as if Mustang's insult were simply a pleasant reminder that he was absurdly well-dressed to be in the middle of the desert.

"Consider my clothing a symbol of respect," Kimblee responds smoothly. "We're in a situation where the military uniform is hardly appropriate. And yet, no one here is looking like a slob. I'm simply going the extra mile; it would be hugely impolite to show up to what is probably the worst days of these people's lives looking like I stopped by on my way back from the grocery."

The tent that Mustang is going to share with Havoc (not Mustang's preferred sleeping arrangement, since Havoc snores like a lawnmower, but at least he can bum cigarettes off of him) has been up since Kimblee decided to grace them with his presence, but Mustang is still gripping it, white-knuckled and gritted-teethed. "Why are you here, Kimblee?" he asks, and Riza places her palm flat against his forearm, which is bared due to rolled-up shirtsleeves, but he shrugs her off, and her hand falls uselessly back to her side. "You obviously want to be here for some reason, even though you don't take what we're doing seriously, so what is it?"

Riza thinks that, under different circumstances, Kimblee could've been a very handsome man. He's impeccably groomed, with a slim, well-structured face. But there's something in his eyes, or the set of his lips, that makes her stomach churn, a kind of casual cruelty that he wears like a fashionable jacket, like he enjoys it. He and Mustang don't honestly look all that different, but even with Mustang's foppish tendencies and hedonism, there's a warmth there, burning low and constant as a pilot light, that Kimblee doesn't have.

Kimblee's lips are thin and sharp-looking, as if his mouth were less a mouth than a knife wound, and so when he smiles the effect is slightly grotesque. "That's easy. I'm here because I enjoy what we do. I enjoy piloting an Alchemist and watching as it destroys things. I like knowing that I hold the lives of thousands of people in my hands. I'm here because I want to be."

Riza shivers, the desert's early-evening chill snaking under her jacket. She watches as a muscle in Mustang's jaw pulses from the force with which he is gritting his teeth, and then watches as he ducks angrily into his tent. Riza's eyes meet Havoc's, and he only shakes his head, spitting the butt of his cigarette out into the sand.

* * *

They're smaller than they ever were since they've known each other, each no older than twelve. Roy never knew her when she was that young, and he's never seen a picture of her any older than her graduation photo from Central U. Her father got rid of every picture of her or her mother long before Roy ever showed up. But looking at her, leading him out the backdoor of her father's house, he knows for certain that this is exactly what she would have looked like then: blonde hair with its tips gently brushing against the tops of her shoulders, fringe pinned back in a barrette, in a remarkably pretty dress that looks completely unlike her. Her mother must have bought it for her. Her mother must still be alive.

Every time the thought that he shouldn't be here brushes against his thoughts, it always dissipates, like sugar in hot tea, and he finds himself sucked back into whatever is happening here, on Riza's hand gently but insistently pulling his out of the guest bedroom and down the stairs and out the door.

Outside, things are different, though. The already overgrown garden has grown even more and is now a full-fledged forest, thickly-wooded and dark. It looks foreboding, and Roy is small and easily frightened, still soft-skinned from the kisses of his sisters and his pampering foster mother, but Riza is still pulling him ever closer to the mouth of the woods. She isn't dragging him, and he knows that if he pulled away, her hand would leave his, like a wayward bird, and she wouldn't stop him if he ran back to the house, back into his drafty bedroom, huddled under the thick quilts that one of Riza's great-grandmothers had made, and he would be safe. He knows that Riza would continue into those woods, though, and he doesn't know what is in there. He won't lose her, and so he follows.

In the woods, it's even darker than he imagined. He shouldn't be able to see, and neither should Riza, but she is sure-footed as a deer, and she guides him silently across the forest floor until they reach what she had brought them out together to see. Suspended in one of the taller trees is a treehouse, a scale model of the Hawkeye estate, equally crumbling, almost decadent in its decay.

"Can you climb trees?" Riza asks. In the gloom, her eyes practically glow, like a cat's, and he shakes his head. Of course he can't climb trees. Does he look like a boy who spent his childhood climbing trees? The only trees in Central City are ornamental and much too small to climb. "Okay," she says, and begins to scale the tree herself, nimbly, with the kind of childhood grace that Roy never possessed. When she gets to the treehouse, she climbs in through a square opening in the floorboards and then, moments later, unfurls a rope ladder that extends down to where Roy is standing. Roy looks the ladder over warily, but Riza's head is dangling upside-down from the opening, hair looking almost silver in the dim forest light. "Don't worry," she says. "I won't let you fall."

He knows this to be true, and so he climbs. When he reaches the treehouse, Riza is sitting cross-legged on the floor, waiting patiently for him. He sits across from her, unsure of what to do, and watches in horror as a salamander scuttles mere centimeters away from his knee. The little thing is fat and long, with slick-looking red skin mottled with black dots, and though it frightens Roy in a way he can't articulate, Riza extends a hand to the floor. The salamander waddles up to her, climbing onto her hand, and she lifts it up, examining it in the dim light. It sits on her hand, looking as content as an amphibian can, and she considers it with scientific silence before gripping its belly tightly with her hand. With her other hand she reaches up and gently, almost kindly, plucks one of the salamander's stubby legs off and drops it like a peanut shell on the floor.

Roy starts, staring as this girl, so bizarrely kind, so strangely caring, tenderly disassembles this little lizard, her hands soaked in slimy-looking blood, staining her nice dress. It's so incongruously grisly, looking at Riza, still plump-cheeked with youth, still so unexpectedly stern, even as a child, that Roy can't look away as his friend pays the poor creature such close, doting affection as she rips off its limbs. As the last leg falls to the floor, she looks down at its body and, with all the grace of handing over a newborn baby, holds it out to Roy. He looks down at the bloody thing, unsure of why Riza brought him up here, of what she wants from him. Confused by his friend, but perhaps no more confused than he always is, he opens his hands to hers, and she drops the remains of the salamander into his palms.

Where the salamander touches his skin, it sears, as if it were actually the flame lizard it was named for. Confused, scared, and hurt, he looks up at Riza for reassurance, but she's gone, replaced with Captain Hawkeye, even more inscrutable than her childhood counterpart. 

"Why are you doing this to me?" he asks, and finds the voice in his throat is no longer that of a child's.

"I'm not doing anything to you that you haven't already done to yourself," she soothes, and her voice is like honey to him, thick and sweet and golden.

His hands are no longer burning, but when he looks down he sees the sigil of the Flame Alchemist seared onto the backs of both of his hands.

* * *

 

"Mustang! Mustang, wake up, God damn it!" He comes out of his dream heavily, with none of the sharpness that normally happens when he wakes from a nightmare. He surfaces from its depths like having swum to the bottom of a lake, with only minimum urgency. He is being dragged out of that lake by a pair of strong hands, which he only realizes several moments later belong to Jean Havoc.

"Havoc? Wha...What's going on? What's wrong?" He misses the clarity that always follows a nightmare, the sheer jarring return to reality and the knowledge that the nightmare is over. But this is unnerving, this softness in the border between sleep and waking. He wouldn't say the dream about Hawkeye and the salamander was a nightmare, necessarily, but it was certainly nightmarish, and he finds himself distinctly unsettled by it.

Even in the dark of their tent, Roy can see that Havoc is harried, and the muscles in his forearms are taut. "It's Gluttony," Havoc spits out quickly. "The SAGE was right it's...it's Gluttony and you need to get into your plug suit right now."

This feels more like a dream than the dream had. But he doesn't have to question Havoc further, because he can hear them, perhaps a few miles away, but he can still hear them nonetheless: screams. There are people dying right now.

The Alchemists are too large to be transported from Central  _in toto_ , and so were transported in parts across various trucks. Outside of Roy's tent, the technicians and engineers are frantically assembling them like the world's largest set of Legos. Even though the State Alchemist Program may have the world's most advanced technology, no one can say they aren't good with their hands and a little old-fashioned elbow grease. By the light of the desert moon, Rebecca Catalina looks downright formidable as she directs the other engineers, including a supremely frazzled looking Denny Brosh, who is doling out plug suits to Armstrong and Kimblee when Roy stumbles out into the night.

"The Amestrian military's poster boy has finally deigned to grace us with his presence," Kimblee croons, pressing the button on the wrist of his plug suit that causes it to cling to his spindly frame.

Roy hasn't gotten enough sleep to deal with Kimblee's bullshit, and so he simply chooses not to. 

Out of the corner of his eye he sees Hawkeye and Hughes walking toward Colonel Armstrong's tent. Her hands look clean. He looks down, and so do his.

* * *

Their medical facilities are a bit limited out here. They hadn't anticipated really needing them, never thought they'd be gone more than a week, just standard open and shut; show up and destroy this thing, go home. That isn't what happens, of course. Things are very rarely that simple. They don't have the time or the means to send people back to Central, or even back to East, for medical treatment, can't afford to have them that far away if Gluttony shows up again, which they all know it will, and so two of the larger tents have been commandeered by Marcoh and Knox, the two heads of their medical team. After getting supremely chewed out by Knox about their poor planning and the fact that he, "out of the goodness of his heart," has left behind his wife and son to be here and it's their fault they won't be going home, Riza and Hughes are sitting shoulder to shoulder in the tent where Mustang sleeps. He isn't injured, but he is weak and out of it, and so here they are. The few villagers that managed to survive are in the other tent, being watched over by Marcoh. Kimblee and Armstrong are being questioned by the Colonel. Everyone else has separated to handle the night's events in their own way. Havoc, Breda, Fuery, and Falman are splitting the singular case of beer that Havoc brought. Mustang will be pissed about that when he wakes up, but for now he looks remarkably at peace with the world.

Were it not for some cleverly placed bombs from the Crimson Lotus Alchemist and the Strong Arm Alchemist quite literally picking up a building and shoving it into the gaping maw of Gluttony, Mustang would be dead right now, and so would everyone else. Eventually Gluttony's hunger would be sated, but not before the whole Program had been ingested. A somber quiet has fallen over their encampment, and as much as Riza prefers to be alone after traumatic events, she's glad that Hughes is with her.

He keeps inhaling deeply, as if he were about to say something, but then thinks better of it and exhales. There honestly isn't much to say. One of the most important people in both of their lives almost just died, and they watched it happen, and there was nothing they could do about it. That's the kind of fear that nests in you, that metastasizes and takes over other areas of your body, leaving you sickly with worry. As Riza sits, she looks at Hughes, looks at Mustang, and wonders at the life they have built for themselves, at the sheer instability of it. They have built a house with a rotted foundation, and any day now the whole thing will cave in on itself.

She hears Hughes inhale deeply again and is prepared for it to once again come to nothing, but this time words do have the courage to leave his lips, and they're not the ones she expects to hear. She expects some comment on their situation, on Mustang, on Alchemists, or homunculi, or Ishval, or anything. But, instead, what he says is "So, I asked Gracia to marry me."

Somehow, that news is more startling to her than any sort of other revelation could be. "What?"

He nods. The muscles in his face look conflicted, as if he wants to smile but knows he shouldn't, and so they have aligned themselves into an uncomfortable looking grimace. "Yup, I asked her to marry me a couple days before we left for here. I just...God, look at Roy. He could've  _died_ , Riza, and I couldn't help thinking before we left that  _I_ could die, and what if I died without Gracia ever knowing that I want to marry her? That would be my biggest regret. Even if I die here, which I don't plan on doing, she'll know that much."

"Why are you telling me this?" Even though she knows that Hughes isn't as indifferent toward her as she had first thought, this kind of confidence seems uncharacteristic with the kind of bond she thought they had made with each other.

Hughes takes off his glasses, uselessly cleaning off the smudged lenses on his scratchy military jacket. It won't help, and may even scratch the lenses, but Riza understands the necessity of having something to do with your hands at times like this. "I mean, you would find out eventually. I mean, you'd be invited!  _Will_ be invited," he corrects himself. "You'll be invited, and so will everybody at the Program, and so will Roy. And..." He replaces his glasses, looking down at her. "Would it be weird to ask Roy to be my best man?"

Riza isn't one to sugar-coat things, and so she tells the truth: "Yes, it would be weird." Hughes nods, as if that were the answer he were expecting, but Riza isn't finished. "It'd be weird, but I think he would be honored. Truly. And I think he would do it, because whatever history you have with each other aside, he considers you his best friend. If he  _wasn't_ your best man I think it'd be weirder."

The warmth with which Hughes looks at her makes her want to shrink away. She isn't sure how Mustang managed to date him, being the sole recipient of so much goodness at one time. It makes her feel guilty, and she can't say why. "I'm so glad that Roy has you. It makes me worry about him a little less."

"How do you mean?"

Hughes's brows knit together for a moment before a look of embarrassed understanding washes over his face. "Oh my god. You're not...Oh god, I'm sorry, I just assumed..."

"You just assumed what?"

"That you and Roy were...you know what, never mind."

The silence falls back over them, this time a little less comfortably, like a heavy blanket in the middle of summer. It chafes enough at Hughes that he adds, "Oh, and one more thing. If you could, uh, not tell Roy? At least not until I have the chance to do it myself. Now just, uh, doesn't seem like a great time for that kind of news."

For a moment, Riza is almost jealous of the peaceful look on Mustang's face. "What kind of world are we living in when getting married sounds like bad news?"

"This one, unfortunately," Hughes says. Mustang's breathing is quiet, but steady and even, and between that and the mournful desert wind, the night almost feels peaceful. Fatigue is beginning to set in on Riza, and she knows that she should get up and go back to her own tent, but that feels terribly far away, and she weighs the pros and cons of just sleeping sitting up on the floor of Mustang's tent.

"Oh, Roy Mustang," Hughes muses quietly. "What are we gonna do with you?"

Riza doesn't answer, because she doesn't know.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so, slight disclaimer here: I don't know if any of the FMA characters have canon birthdays or not, so for the zodiac signs I have assigned them based on personality traits alone. If they do happen to have canon birthdays that do not match up with the zodiac signs I have assigned to them: ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
> Also, Roy's dream is heavily, heavily inspired by the song "The Woods," by San Fermin, which has always reminded me of young Royai for some reason. The album that track is from--"Jackrabbit"--has served as a kind of unofficial soundtrack for me when writing this fic, so I would definitely give it a listen.


	13. "...crown your king when your life is broken."

"Sometimes it's hard to believe this place represents some of the most sophisticated technology on the planet," Riza says, flipping her phone shut. "We have the capability to neurally link a human being with a machine and to combat the greatest terror humanity has ever faced, and yet I have no fucking cell reception down here."

"It's funny to hear you talk about technological sophistication when you still use a flip phone," Mustang says with a snort.

"I literally just need a phone to be a phone," Riza responds. "Unlike you, I don't need to take a million pictures of my face to feel good about myself."

Mustang whistles. "I never realized you were so anti-selfie, Captain."

"I'm not anti-anything, I just don't get it. I know what I look like; I see my face every day. Why would I want to see more of it?"

"It's not that you're seeing more of your own face, it's that other people are seeing you the way you want them to. The way you want to see yourself."

Riza isn't nearly as backward as Mustang and Rebecca think she is; she owns a computer and she uses it regularly. She begrudgingly made a Facebook when she joined up with the Program, because Rebecca was insistent upon them all having a Facebook group, but she hardly ever uses it. And because she doesn't have a smart phone, she isn't ever on the receiving end of the copious selfies that she has heard Mustang has the tendency to take when he's drunk or bored. Hughes did have a running album of screenshotted SnapChats of all of their friends on Facebook, but she hasn't had the heart to look at it since--

"Are the you that you see in the mirror and the you that you want people to see really that different?"

He coughs noisily. "God, my throat is dry. Do you think I could get that intern to bring me iced tea down here?"

Riza closes her eyes. That's Roy Mustang for you: thirty years old and still hopeless.

"But, even with my limited knowledge of our fine organization, I still know something you don't know."

"Oh, I'm sure you know plenty of things I don't know," she counters.

"Down here, it'd be logistically impossible for us to have cell reception at all. But in this day and age, it'd be disastrous for us to be without our phones, especially for contacting people above-ground, and so we used government funding to develop a miniature cell tower. But, since the power is out, that won't be running, which is why we are stranded with no means of contacting anyone outside this elevator, which is fucking delightful."

"What a commendable use of taxpayer  _cenz_ ," Riza rejoins drily. "What on earth would we do if Edward Elric couldn't send SnapChats to his brother while he was supposed to be figuring out how to save the world from giant monsters?"

"How is Alphonse?" Mustang asks suddenly. "I haven't seen him in..." Something catches in his throat, but he works through it, almost as if it were simply a yawn he didn't want to entertain. "A while."

The swift onset of sadness in this small cell hits Riza with unexpected force, and so she goes out of her way to keep her tone light. "He's good. It's hard on him, Ed's work, especially since, unlike Winry, there's nothing he can do here to feel like he's helping. But they're a family. It's...it's really remarkable. They're all so young, but they're so strong. Stronger than I'll ever be. They've made this space, this completely supportive, safe place, in my home, and I see it every day, but it never stops being amazing. They're all great kids, and they'll grow up to do great things. All of them." She realizes only after the fact that she has been babbling, and after all of the jokes she has gotten since they have moved in with her about being a mother hen, she feels slightly embarrassed at possibly proving all of them right, and so she hides her chagrin by pushing her fringe out of her eyes.

"If Ed gets to grow up at all, you mean."

Riza has always thought that there was something captivating about Roy Mustang's eyes, in the most literal use of the term. Occasionally, she feels herself get taken captive by them. When she was a girl, this was a heady feeling, like when her grandfather in East City let her have wine with dinner, something exciting and a little bit dangerous. But now, she feels herself being taken to a very dark place. There has been a darkness in him for a while, something that has been festering since Ishval, but which has begun to rot even more since the death of Hughes. His jollity seems even more forced now, a kind of grotesque puppet show that seems even bleaker in hindsight when she remembers that the only other person who would recognize this as a pantomime is now lying dead in the ground.

"He will," she says, trying to push back against his shade with the weight of her promise. "I swear he will grow up, and Alphonse and Winry too. They will see the other end of this. If I have to die so that they don't have to, then so be it."

A frost of grief begins to cloud over his eyes. "You shouldn't have to die for them."

"Why? I would die for you."

"I would die for you, too." 

It is always odd to hear something you had always figured to be true but never actually heard spoken aloud. The feeling isn't surprise, or alarm, but a gentle confirmation, uncanny, like remembering something from a dream. They are on equal footing. There is something bizarrely comforting in knowing this.

"Then there you go."

There is really nothing to say after someone has just confessed that they would die for you if necessary, but silence feels suffocating and itchy, like a too-small sweater that doesn't suit you anymore, and so she asks "When do you think they'll get us out of here?"

"Yeah, just my luck," he says, the familiar Mustang sarcasm back as easy as falling into your mother tongue after speaking a different language. "I'm stuck in an elevator with  _you_."

"It could be worse," she replies. "It could always be worse."

* * *

With no air conditioning, no cell reception, no lights, no power, and thus, no way to operate the Alchemists, the pilots were sent home. Well, all the pilots not currently trapped in an elevator.

"So, uh...I can just leave?" 

Colonel Armstrong is sitting in a chair, being fanned with a magazine by Havoc. He had been conscripted to the task, to which he replied with "Why can't the intern do it? They aren't doing anything else." But the Colonel oh-so kindly informed him that the intern had been called away by General Bradley, and if he had such an issue with the General's usage of staff, then she would be more than happy to tell him about it. He has been fanning in silence since.

The Colonel shrugs. She has been unusually listless since their air conditioning has been on the fritz, and she looks remarkably like a wilted plant in her chair. Ed doesn't think her wardrobe has been updated since she moved down from Briggs, so he can only imagine that she must be sweltering.

"There's no point in keeping you here if there's nothing for you to do. It's more economical for us if we don't pay you for work you aren't doing."

The Colonel's eyes are closed, and so he allows himself a small scowl that he wouldn't normally in her presence. "That's the Program for you. Always economical."

"Don't get sassy with me, kid," Armstrong replies icily. "I'm in no mood for it. Just be glad I'm letting you out of this hell-hole and into some place that hopefully has air conditioning."

"About that," he says. "What about Mustang and the Captain?"

"Honestly, I think this about serves Mustang right. It's a shame he had to pull Hawkeye into this though. Because of her rank, she wouldn't be able to leave right now regardless, but to spend all this time stuck in an elevator with  _Roy Mustang_ of all people is a special kind of punishment, and one she doesn't deserve."

To pardon the pun, Colonel Armstrong is known for her icy disposition. She's not particularly affectionate with anyone, and even the people whom she calls friends--like Catalina and Hawkeye--their relationships tend more toward "respect" than warmth. But the vitriol she holds toward Mustang is particularly sharp, and Ed isn't sure why. Sure, Mustang's an asshole, but he always figured everyone was in on the joke. He's not  _really_ an asshole, he just plays one on TV. Anyone who had had their eyes checked could see that underneath that suave, cheeky veneer is a person of remarkable ordinariness. While there are pieces of him that are extraordinary and not manufactured--his ambition, his intelligence, his skill--underneath that, he holds the most astonishingly ordinary trait of all: he cares. His caring is so genuine that he has to hide it, underneath layers of sarcasm and expensive hair gel and arguments. He cares about their work, he cares about Amestris, he cares about his friends. Hell, he even cares about him, even though all they do is argue, and Ed is taking up time and space in the life of Hawkeye. Perhaps the one extraordinary thing about his caring is his caring about Hawkeye. He figures that Mustang and Hawkeye are both too close to see it themselves, but from afar, that level of devotion seems terrifying and unnatural, like those ornamental trees whose cuttings are tied together as saplings, so that they grow into a braid.

He has been living with Riza Hawkeye for a while now, has known both her and Mustang for what feels like a very long time, has talked to them quite a lot, and still knows nothing about them. But, no matter how little he knows about them as individuals, he knows even less about them together, about the strange, heavy baggage they seem to carry between them, something that feels too old and private to ask about.

"I do understand that she takes you to and from work, correct?"

"Yes, sir."

"Will you be able to get home?"

"From the Tunnel station near here I can get to the city center, so I think I'll just go pester my brother at school."

"Alright then. Hopefully this will all be fixed by tomorrow."

"Will do," he says, throwing a jaunty salute even though she isn't looking at him. "Stay cool, Colonel." 

* * *

 "You know, it's a good thing neither of us is claustrophobic, because if we were this would be a fucking nightmare." He looks up at the ceiling as if expecting answers, but when nothing comes he just quirks a dark eyebrow. "Well, more of one than it already is."

Mustang is remarkably glib for someone who is trapped in an elevator, but Riza isn't hugely surprised. If anyone could turn this pain in the ass into a jaunty tale, it's him.

"How do you know I'm not claustrophobic?" Riza asks.

"You're not, are you?" Mustang asks, suddenly concerned. He springs from feeling to feeling with all the lightness of a bird on a branch, which Riza thinks must be exhausting. Her emotions are steady and calm until they aren't, a small boat on a placid ocean, unrattled except for the occasional passing storm.

Riza snorts. "No, I'm not, but you'd feel like a real asshole if I was, wouldn't you?"

Mustang laughs, rocking his head back onto the wall of the elevator. "I always feel like a real asshole."

"Now may not be the best time to say this," Riza says. "But you are actually a startlingly good person. For some reason you don't seem to understand that."

"This is too earnest of a conversation to have while trapped in an elevator," Mustang says, but even with his urbane flippantness, he can't disguise the pleased-looking flush creeping up his lovely cheekbones.

"According to my mystery novels, elevators are actually a perfect place for heartfelt conversation. Well, heartfelt conversation and fucking against walls." A small, startled cough sounds from the back of Mustang's throat. It must be strange, she thinks, to hear someone you met as, for all intents and purposes, a child talking this way. It's like he never expects her to talk in the same ways their friends do, like she's somehow above it. She doesn't think she's above much; she just generally keeps her raunchy comments to herself. "And according to my mother, heat makes people honest, and it's certainly hot enough in here." Riza's hair is weighing heavily on her back, and so she reaches into her satchel to pull out her hair clip. She pulls up her hair, but that only does so much to abate the heat.

"If you're so hot, you should just take your shirt off."

"And you wonder why people think we're fucking." A lesser man would have wilted under her withering glare, but Mustang has been on the receiving end of it countless times, and has built up a thick skin. 

He raises up his hands in defense. "Hear me out, here. I mean nothing unsavory by that, but you legitimately look really hot." Mustang catches his misstep before Riza can call him out on it. He swipes a hand over his face. "God, I mean, you look  _overheated_. Not that you don't look attractive but..."

"Quit while you're ahead, Mustang," Riza advises.

"You have a valid point. But I'm serious. God knows you have no reason to be shy around me."

He's right in that respect. Physically, they have nothing to hide from each other. They have plenty to hide from each other in other ways. It truly is unreasonably hot in the elevator, and that would probably be helped a smidge by not wearing a shirt. Their friendship is a bizarre one where this could possibly be an option; this isn't how men and women tend to be friends with each other. Or anyone, really. She thinks, though, that if this were Becca or even Olivier, she wouldn't even hesitate. Olivier is gay, and Becca once kissed her, and she would not feel the slightest twinge of embarrassment if it were either of them in here suggesting to take off her shirt. Why should Mustang be any different? She's known him longer than she's known anyone else at this point. They  _lived_ together, for God's sake, not to mention--

"You take yours off first."

Mustang looks slightly impressed. He barely takes the time to mull that over before saying "Fair enough," and unzipping the front of his plug suit, peeling it off of his arms and letting it fall around his hips. "I don't really need this, I suppose." He reaches up and takes the plug headband from his hair, running a hand through it so that it can fall back into its usual state of disarray. 

Riza has seen his naked torso before. It's kind of difficult not to see the naked torso of someone when they are a cisgender man and they have lived with you for various stretches of time. After coming out of his awkward adolescence with the startling force of a steam train, Mustang is incredibly proud of his body. Perhaps he doesn't look for excuses to show it off in the same way Armstrong does (Armstrong, whose entirely honest self-confidence is almost as enviable as his triceps), but he is no shrinking violet. In their first sweltering year in Central, Mustang had snuck her into the University's swimming pool on particularly hot days, and when the air conditioning in their dinky student flat went on the fritz (which it did frequently), he took to lounging on the tile floor of their tiny kitchen in nothing but boxers.

Riza is, in fact, more acquainted with Mustang's body than a lot of people, or, at least, more consistently acquainted. A lot of people have seen it once, or twice, but few have seen it as often as her, to the point where she knows that she should be feeling some sort of lizard brain, blood flow response to seeing him like this, but she can't. To her, his body may as well be an extension of hers, something as intimately familiar to her as her own belly, her own chest. And she knows, unlike many, that if he were to turn around, there would be a large, red-ink tattoo taking up most of his back of the Flame Alchemist's sigil. She was there when he got it. 

It was in the tumultuous months after their return from Ishval when she got a call one Saturday afternoon asking if she would drive him to a tattoo parlor in the city. She was confused, but obliged. He was unusually tacit on their ride in into the city center, and when they finally got to the tattoo shop, she sat tight-lipped and clasp-handed in the lobby while he jiggled his knee up and down in the seat next to her.

Eventually, he turned to her said "Alright, I know you want to say something. Spit it out."

She shrugged. "I'm not your mother. Even if I was, it's your body. It's none of my business what you do with it."

He smirked. "You're significantly more lenient about this than the cigarettes."

"The cigarettes are different. A tattoo won't hurt you, at least not much. It won't kill you."

"The cigarettes won't kill me either. At least, not for a while."

She didn't respond to that. 

Around fifteen minutes later, the tattoo artist--a slim woman with short blonde hair and a tattoo snaking up from her arm onto her cheek--emerged from a small studio room with a sheet of printer paper and a design. Riza recognized it immediately. At its core, it was the Flame Alchemist's sigil: a circle containing two interlocking triangles and a salamander, with a small fireball crowning the top. Staying consistent to theme, all the Alchemists' sigils were taken from alchemical transmutation circles, with the Flame Alchemist's being a circle that, supposedly, could produce fire. Ultimately, however, it's just a pretty design, and true to the aesthetic of the Program. But this took that symbol and expanded it, spinning out from the central circle into something new. Even Riza, who is indifferent toward tattoos on the best of days, couldn't deny that it was beautiful.

Dutifully, she followed Mustang and the tattoo artist into a small room, reminiscent of a doctor's office, and watched as he slipped his t-shirt off from over his head and stretched out onto the work-table with all the lazy grace of someone laying out on a beach. The tattoo artist stenciled the design onto his back, taking up a large portion of it, and worked for three solid hours (stopping only once for ten minutes so that both she and Mustang could smoke a cigarette) before wrapping his back in plastic wrap, and sending him home.

Riza had never seen someone get a tattoo before, and so she was in the dark regarding much of the process. To her surprise, she found herself oddly curious about the whole affair. Watching the needles drilling ink into his skin had been equal parts grisly and enchanting. Through the whole session, he had only made minimal chitchat with the tattoo artist, and Riza was content to let the silence stretch and fill the room like smoke. The steady hum of the tattoo gun lulled her into a kind of trance. "How many more times will you have to go back?"

He shrugged gingerly, careful to not irritate the fresh wounds on his back, as they sat at a cheap diner, eating a dinner of scrambled eggs, toast, and coffee. "It really depends. I'd say three or four more, probably."

Riza sipped at her coffee, thinking of how, despite what she had heard about tattoos being quite painful, Mustang laid silently as the thin woman pricked ink into his flesh. "Do you want me to take you?"

"You don't have to," he said, taking a bite of overly-buttered toast. "I could get someone else to do it."

"Do you want to?"

"Not particularly," he admitted. "This just feels kind of...private."

"But you asked me to go. You could've just called a cab."

"Yeah, I could, but you don't count with stuff like this. You know that."

He was right. It had been a long time since "private" was a sphere consisting of one. Mustang may as well have been an aspect of herself. It may as well have been the Flame Alchemist's sigil on her back.

The tattoo artist was speedy and diligent, and it only took three more visits for the design to be completed. Riza watched as the sigil arched and moved with Mustang's shoulder blades and found that it suited him, like it had blossomed organically onto his skin one night, a latent birthmark. 

She never asked him why he got it, because she didn't like asking questions that she already knew the answers to. Everything with Mustang was a quest for catharsis, a way to exorcise himself of his demons. She could see it in the vacant look in his eyes as the needles brought flame-red drops of blood to the surface of his skin. He wants to be scarred for the things that he does, wants it to hurt. The tattoo only seems appropriate, horrible and beautiful and painful and noble in equal measure. She doesn't know how many people have seen it since he got it, how many people have seen his naked torso in general. She always assumed that he would continue his life as it had been before he left, going out, bringing people home, but recent developments are making her think otherwise. Maybe it's only her. She thinks that she should feel slightly honored by that, but mostly she just feels sad. She wishes that his guilt didn't have to sit on the surface of his skin but under his clothes. She wishes they didn't have demons so violent that they had to be removed with self-flagellation. 

"Your turn," Mustang says.

"Alright," Riza responds, and tries to unbutton her shirt in the most huffy way possible, just so that he knows this wasn't her idea. Several seconds later she is in nothing but her bra and skirt, and as much as she tries to keep a challenge in her eyes, she can't help but release a small breath of pleasure as her naked back connects with the cool steel of the elevator wall.

"See?" he asks.

"Alright, fine," she concedes. "This was a good idea."

He chuckles, a comfortable, warm tone that sounds of very specific memories, of her father's kitchen, of him splashing water in her face at the Central University pool, of them both, starry-eyed, laughing like guilty teenagers at Maes and Gracia's wedding. It sounds like the best parts of Mustang--no, the best parts of  _Roy_ , of the whip-smart boy who, deep down, only wants to help people, wants to help her, but doesn't truly know how. He cares so deeply, for her, for everyone, that occasionally it feels like she is a grand old house that has fallen into disrepair that he keeps sinking money into, hoping to one day restore it to its former glory, but he never will. She has too many crooked door frames, too many missing shingles, too many cobwebs. She doesn't need to be fixed, has no illusions of it ever happening, and doesn't think that Mustang is trying to fix her, not necessarily. He just wants to  _help_ , with all the earnestness of a child who still thinks that kissing a wound will make it hurt less.

Having this small glimpse at the boy she used to know almost convinces her to not say what she needs to say, but she's always been good at being a buzzkill. "So, now is probably a good time to address the elephant in the room."

"The fact that we're both half-naked?" 

"No, the other elephant."

"There are other elephants?"

"There are plenty of elephants. We're practically in a pachyderm sanctuary."

"That's news to me." It probably isn't, in fact, news to him, but Mustang is excellent at deflecting difficult conversations. "So which particular noble beast are we planning on shooting down today?"

"The fact that you've been avoiding me would probably be a good place to start."

He lets out a startled little giggle. "Avoiding you? How could I have possibly been avoiding you? You drive me to and from work everyday."

"You know exactly what I mean. I'm a little offended that you would think I wouldn't notice."

Mustang takes a moment to respond, which is unlike him, being someone so renowned for rapid-fire conversation, but Riza knows this means that she caught him off-guard. If she managed to do that, he may actually be straight with her, or at least as much as he ever can.

"Alright, fine. I've been avoiding you," he finally admits, eyes looking somewhere over her shoulder, perhaps studying the board of useless floor buttons on the wall.

"Why? Have I done something to offend you?"

Riza knows that she and Mustang had very different upbringings. Aside from running a bordello, Chris Mustang launders information for a living. She knows how to steer a conversation in whatever direction she needs to in order to have you say or not say whatever she chooses. Mustang inherited her abilities, but has also inherited an unfortunate inclination toward passive-aggression. Unless you're Edward Elric or Solf J. Kimblee, you are unlikely to know if Mustang is ever actually mad at you. Riza, on the other hand, was raised by incredibly direct parents, who saw no reason in beating around the bush: if you're upset with someone, tell them, and if they do the same to you, don't fight them on it. You sit, listen to their complaints, and try to work things out diplomatically. Riza's parents never fought that she can remember, but would often be found sitting at the kitchen table having quiet, thoughtful conversations.

"No, God, of course not. You've been amazing. It's just..." He scratches at his neck anxiously. "When I look at you, it makes me feel guilty."

Riza's brow knits. "Guilty?" She knows that Mustang feels his fair share of guilt. So does she, but she doesn't understand why that would directly implicate her.

He nods, looking remarkably conciliatory. She knows that Mustang would probably rather be having a root canal at this exact moment than have this conversation with her, but clearly it needs to be had.

"It's not about what you think," he assures her. "This has nothing to do with Ishval. It has to do with Hughes." He inhales and exhales deeply several times, trying to steel his nerves, which Riza finds slightly hilarious. Roy Mustang, pilot of humanity's Last Great Hope, is scared of sharing his feelings with _her._ What is this world coming to. "Whenever I look at you, I'm reminded of what we're keeping from Elric. About Hughes's death."

"I see."

They sit in silence. Riza hadn't noticed until then just how thick the air in their little cell has gotten. She isn't particularly worried about them suffocating--she's certain they'll get out of there eventually--but aside from their own breathing, no air is getting circulated, and the atmosphere is as sticky and humid inside as it probably is above-ground. He is exhaling his guilt, and she is taking it into her own lungs. Hopefully she can breathe something purer back into the air.

"You can't avoid me forever."

"I know. And I know this isn't your fault--"

"It's both of our faults. We decided on this together."

"I know."

"And we're doing this from a place of concern. No matter what you say, I know you legitimately care about Ed."

"Whether I care about him or not, he's just a kid."

Sometimes Riza is reminded of the fact that Mustang is laughably noble. He believes so strongly in good, in protecting those who aren't as strong as him. Riza is the one who worries, but she worries about everyone. She guesses that his sisters probably read him too many medieval tales about dashing knights protecting the weak. She doubts that this is how he anticipated his life going. He wanted to protect the people he loves, but he never expected so much collateral damage.

"He's just a kid," he repeats. "And he's seen more heavy shit than any kid should have to. Hell, more than any person should have to."

"We've seen heavy shit too," Riza reminds him.

"Yeah," he agrees, "but we're adults. Everyone will see dark stuff if they live long enough." 

She shakes her head. "No, not like we have."

"I don't want that for him."

She laughs. "You sound like his father."

"Now that's a scary thought."

"I don't think so," Riza says. The thought of Mustang with children isn't scary so much as it's odd. She never imagined he would slow down long enough to find someone to live with forever, let alone to raise children with. He's a being of constant inertia, and she could only imagine the person who would provide enough force to stop him for a moment. The only trouble is, even if that happened, Mustang could probably take care of someone else adoringly and still not be able to take care of himself.

"This just isn't what I wanted when I signed up to be a pilot." This is the most honest he's been with her in a very long time, and this kind of sustained openness is making her skin prickle. "I wanted to protect people, to make sure no one had to deal with what you had to. And I failed, and I keep failing. I couldn't help Ed and I couldn't help Hughes, and now look at me. Look at both of us." 

She looks at him and he looks at her. She sees two people with exceedingly good intentions who are in so far over their heads that it's amazing they haven't drowned yet.

"This isn't what I wanted for you," he says, and the way he looks at her makes her tongue go heavy in her mouth. It's the same way he looked at her that night eleven years ago, when he confirmed her worst fears and gave her exactly what she wanted. It's the same heady cocktail of fear and excitement, of looking adulthood full in the face, of both wanting it and wanting to run away from it. Riza is twenty-seven years old now, and whenever he looks at her with those pretty black eyes, she still feels as if she is sitting in the uncanny space between being seen as a girl and feeling like an adult. Now, though, it's flipped: everyone sees her as an adult, but when he looks at her like that, she feels just like a girl, lightheaded from her new short hair, heart beating against her ribs like a trapped animal with her crush on the pretty boy who blew into her life one stormy summer afternoon. She's glad for the steel against her back, because her skin suddenly feels very hot.

She wishes she had managed to snag a glass of the iced tea that the intern had made, because her mouth feels very dry as she asks "What did you want for me?"

She didn't realize she had been staring at his mouth until she watches as it begins to form an answer, only for the moment to be sucked away by the elevator beginning to shake, sending both of them careening into the opposite wall.

* * *

 Alphonse Elric likes school. To anyone who knows him, this comes as no surprise: he's a bright, enthusiastic boy with a passion for learning about just about anything. What comes as more of a surprise is that his brother does not, in fact, like school. Edward Elric is also a bright, enthusiastic boy, but his passion for learning is only directed at very specific things, and he has the tendency to believe that he is smarter than most people he encounters which, generally speaking, is usually true. He doesn't like being told what to do, has a startling disrespect for authority, and gets so cripplingly bored that he often falls asleep in random places. In short, Ed going through school so quickly was half him being a genius and half necessity; if he had had to stay in the school system much longer, both he and all of his teachers would have gone crazy. 

Al, however, likes school quite a lot. There is something somewhat comforting about people who know more than you imparting their knowledge to you, something charitable and kind about it. He figures that he probably has some issues with authority relating to his parents, his dead mother and absent father, but in the opposite direction as Ed. Where Ed resents their father for leaving and feels somewhat responsible for their mother dying, he tends to distrust authority figures whenever they appear in their lives. Al, however, finds them sort of reassuring. It's been so long since he's had parents, so whenever people take on pseudo-parental roles he can't help but be a little pleased. This is why he likes Riza, even with all her emotional awkwardness and the way she overworks herself. She tries, and that's what matters.

She also worked hard to get him and Winry into this school. Garfiel's is a top-notch school and recognized nationally for its engineering magnet program. It's a difficult course of study, but Al takes his education very seriously, which is why, when he hears himself being paged to the administrative office over the intercom in the middle of a lab, he's more than a little worried. He's never been a troublemaker (singularly, anyway; Ed has the tendency to bring out all the rebellious sides of his personality, and when they're together he knows they can be little terrors), and as far as he knows, there isn't any reason for him to be called up, especially in the middle of class.

Worry is very quickly replaced with annoyance, however, when he sees his brother standing in the office, looking like the cat who ate the canary.

"Ed?" he asks. "What are you doing here? Shouldn't you be at work?"

"What kind of older brother would I be if I couldn't surprise my brother at school?"

"A normal one?" Al ventures. "I was in the middle of a lab, brother..."

"It's just a lab! You'll have hundreds of them before you graduate, trust me. Missing one won't be that big of a deal. And besides, you've been working really hard, you deserve a break."

"I don't want a break, brother. I want to finish my lab." The office manager is trying very hard to look like she isn't eavesdropping on their conversation, and so Al turns to her and says "If you'll excuse us," before grabbing his brother by his automail arm and dragging him out into the school lobby. "What's going on, Ed? Did something happen at the Program? Is Riza here?"

"Nothing happened," Ed says, stretching his arms over his head. "Riza's still at the Program. But they don't need us pilots right now, so I decided to dip out early. Do you want to go get lunch or something?"

"No, I want to go back to my lab."

Ed pulls a face. "How did I raise such a stick-in-the-mud little brother? Here I am, offering you a get-out-of-class-free card and you're actually turning me down. I'm horrified. Maybe I should just go bother Winry, instead."

Al crosses his arms over his chest, mouth curling up in a surprisingly devilish smirk. "She'd probably be more receptive to it than I would."

"What's that supposed to mean? Any time I bug Winry she throws wrenches at my head. I was joking."

"Yeah, sure."

Ed isn't used to his brother keeping secrets, and so the fact that he isn't sure what Al is insinuating here is making him nervous. "What are you--"

"Listen, Ed, I need to get back to class. I'll see you at home later, okay?"

Al begins to walk back in the direction of his class when he hears the  _Legend of Zelda_ treasure chest-opening sound coming from Ed's pocket. Ed has had the same ringtone for years, even though Winry and Al have both consistently made fun of him for it, but it's never been changed. Now Al has just started to associate the sound of  _Legend of Zelda_ treasure chests with Ed receiving phone calls, which all run the gambit from Winry informing them of what she's making for dinner to Riza asking them to not wait up for her.

"Who is it?" Al asks.

Ed squints down at his phone. Al has been trying to persuade him to get his eyes checked for years (they spent way too much of their childhood reading in their room in the dark after their mom had told them to go to sleep; Al's eyes are fine, but once they got a little older, Ed also started playing video games in the dark too, and so his eyes are probably irreparably fucked), but he's always said that putting contacts in with an automail arm sounds horrifying and that he couldn't pull off glasses.

"I don't recognize the number," Ed says, which is surprising. They're not exactly the kind to randomly accumulate people's phone numbers. "Hello?" he asks into the phone. His already confused expression only bunches up more as he asks "Havoc? What's going on?"

Al has only met Jean Havoc once or twice, but even from those small interactions, it doesn't really make a lot of sense for him to be calling his brother.

After a moment, a loud guffaw bursts from Ed's mouth, followed by a sarcastic "Haha, very funny." After a few moments of silence, however, Ed's sanguine expression dims, replaced by a look of fear. "No, there's no way. That's just not  _possible_...the SAGE has been wrong before, hasn't it? Maybe that's just happening again!"

Al is suddenly struck with a startlingly vivid flashback to sitting in the kitchen of his childhood home in Resembool, probably no older than five, coloring on a sheet of computer paper, and listening as his mother talked on the phone with his father. Even before he left permanently, Hohenheim had a tendency to disappear for long stretches of time. No one entirely knew what he did--though their mother probably did, she never told them--aside from doing some shadowy form of research into something top-secret and arcane-feeling. Whenever he left, their mother would always smile, a bit sadly, and say that he was off doing important work. What that important work was, of course, they didn't know, but in the way of all children, Ed and Al wanted to believe their mother, and so didn't question this for a long time. Standing dumbly in his school uniform, Al feels as he had at that rickety old kitchen table, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

"I...I see. But what about...? Alright, I'll talk to her. I'll get there as quickly as I can." Ed clicks the call away and looks at his brother, eyes blazing like smelted gold. "There's a homunculus in Central Headquarters."

 _Ah,_ Al thinks,  _There it is._ "What? How?"

"I have no idea. There's still so much we don't know about homunculi, and so who knows, honestly, but I have to get back to Central HQ as soon as possible. Plus, I need to get Winry; the power's out, so we're manually rigging the Alchemists and we need as many hands as possible."

"Wait, wait, wait." Al scrubs a hand over his eyes. "The power is out? When I asked you what was going on a minute ago you said 'Nothing happened'! That is not 'nothing,' brother!" When you have lived with someone for as long as Al and Ed, it would be nearly impossible to not get frustrated with them occasionally. With Ed, Al tends to get the most frustrated with Ed keeping things from him. Ed is only a year older than him, but with the way Ed acts sometimes, you would think that he was trying to be Al's father, not his older brother. Al is younger than him, sure, and a bit more sensitive, but he's had to grow up just as quickly as Ed has, and he's strong. He might not be strong in the same ways as Ed, but he's still strong nonetheless, and he wishes his brother would get his head out of his ass long enough to realize that.

"It's not that big of a deal! Really!"

"Brother, your giant robots have to be plugged in in order to function. This is kind of a big deal."

Ed sighs, dropping his phony cheer. "Okay, yeah, you're right. But I don't have time to argue with you about semantics right now. We need to get Winry right now, okay? This is serious."

"Are you being honest right now?"

"For the love of fuck, Al, can we have a brotherly spat some other time?"

Al relents, allowing his annoyance to take a backseat to what needs to be done. "Yeah, fine, let's go find Winry."

"See, Al? You're the best."

"Yeah, whatever," Al says, breaking into a run down the hall with, for once, his brother following at  _his_ heels.

* * *

 Winry has usually been friends with boys. It's something she's never really had cause to think about, because she never had to have other friends. Sure, she had friends other than the Elrics, but they rotated, satellite-like, while the Elrics were always fixed, assumed. If her life were an equation, the Elrics were always the variable she already knew the value of: two. From that she could solve for all other variables. She has never had an issue with other girls, generally, but she usually found it easier to interact with boys her own age. Which is why she is all the more surprised, and all the more pleased, at having met Paninya.

Paninya is also in Garfiel's engineering magnet program, and also comes from an automail background, which is how they met. Because of her automail legs, Paninya had gotten special permission from the administration to allow her to wear a boys' uniform instead of a girls'. They were placed next to each other in their first day of lab, and Winry, infinitely curious and frighteningly outgoing, had asked about it.

They ended up spending most of the lab talking about the work on Paninya's legs, which had Winry starry-eyed and begging to see her engineer (who also turned out to be her foster father). They exchanged numbers after that, and Paninya went back to Riza's apartment with her to make up the work that they missed. From that point onward, they were fast friends. Ed didn't trust her (mainly because she made fun of him too swiftly and he never had time to think up an adequate response) but Riza (although she didn't say it) was glad to have another girl in the apartment. Winry's brightness and Paninya's dry wit reminded her of how she and Rebecca used to interact, back in their younger days.

Winry likes Rebecca. She's funny and smart and capable and still gossips and fawns over boys like a teenager. What she likes more than Rebecca is what a good friend she is to Riza. She doesn't know much about Riza, and what she knows she has actually learned from Rebecca, but she knows that Riza needs somebody in her corner, and if Rebecca is anything, she's definitely that. She thinks that, one day, maybe her and Paninya will be that kind of friends with each other, which means that, of course, the Elrics have to show up and try to ruin everything.

"Uh, Winry?" Paninya whispers. Their teacher--their very interesting, very well-liked calculus teacher--is speaking, and Winry, for one, does not want to be That Kid Who Gets Called Out for Talking in Class. Paninya is much more likely to get in trouble for that, but she also doesn't want to be the cart saddled to that particular wagon just because they're friends.

"Yeah?' she asks, head down facing her notes, bangs obscuring her face.

"Are those yours?"

"Are what mi--" Winry looks up to find every other student also looking up, particularly looking at the door, through the window of which she can just see the tip of an unruly piece of blond hair, and a piece of computer paper with "WE NEED WINRY" written on it in green marker. Right next to the paper, she can see the face of a very apologetic-looking Alphonse. 

She loves them. Sometimes--like right now, for instance--she has to remind herself of that. It doesn't stop being true, it's just sometimes very difficult to remember.

Upon seeing that Winry has also looked up at the door, the entire class turns to look at her. She thanks all of her lucky stars that her calculus teacher has the habit of talking while writing on the board, so that way she can't see what exactly is transpiring in her classroom.

Winry gently curls her left hand into a fist on her thigh, the nails biting into her flesh just soto curb her rage before raising her right hand with a dainty cough.

The teacher stops mid-formula on the board before turning around and adjusting her glasses. "Yes, Winry?"

"May I go to the restroom, please?"

"Yes, of course. Hurry back though, this information will be on the exam."

"Yes, ma'am."

Paninya shoots her a look midway between disappointed and smug as Winry calmly scoops her notebooks into her bag ("You don't need notebooks in the bathroom," Paninya whispers to her. "Shut up," Winry hisses back.) and she quietly exits the room.

Alphonse is looking embarrassed and slightly frantic, but Ed looks about the same as Ed ever looks: excited about  _something_ and constantly bouncing on the balls of his feet, now looking like an overenthusiastic cab driver, waiting to pick up someone at the airport as he's holding their DIY sign. She shoots a look at both of them, then to the window on the door of their classroom, before grabbing Ed roughly by the ear and dragging him down the hallway.

"What? Why are you grabbing  _me?_ Al is here, too!"

"I bet this wasn't his idea, though," Winry says, combat boots slapping loudly against the linoleum. Technically, combat boots are against Garfiel's dress code, but they're the nicest shoes Winry has, and she's a good student, so she's managed to get away with it for this long. "Was it, Al?"

"It  _was_ Ed's idea," Al says, following behind them. "But I agreed. It is kind of an emergency."

"An emergency, huh?" Winry asks bitterly, still dragging. Ed doesn't know his way around his brother's school, and so he has no idea where Winry is taking them until they abruptly stop in front of a pair of double doors. Once Winry releases his ear, he looks up to see that it's the library. Winry looks at him--doesn't look  _down_ , Ed notes, which is new--with a steely look that looks remarkably similar to Riza, and says with terrifying calm "Don't say a word until we get back to the stacks. Am I clear?"

Ed and Al both nod silently as Winry pushes open the doors.

The library of Garfiel's is, like the rest of the school, remarkably spacious, and it takes them much longer than Ed would have expected to finally get to the back of the stacks, where a single, padded library chair sits under a window, sticky Central sunlight streaming in through the panes and illuminating several million dust motes in the air.

"Okay," Winry says, voice hushed but perfectly audible. "What qualifies as enough of an emergency for you to embarrass me in front of my entire calculus class?"

"Do you seriously think I would just pull you out of class for no reason?" Ed has spent enough of his life in libraries now to temper even his usually booming tenor down to a reasonable decibel. 

"Yes," Winry says without missing a beat.

Ed pouts, crossing his arms. "And here I thought I would come get you because you're good at your job and could help us save the world, but I see you want to fight me on that instead."

"I--" Winry stops, prepared to continue chewing him out, but now more confused than angry. "Huh?"

"That's the whole reason he's here," Al says. "Well, it wasn't originally, but that's beside the point."

"I don't mean to alarm you," Ed says. "But there's a homunculus in Central HQ."

Winry blinks twice. "You don't mean to alarm me," she says.

"See? You don't sound alarmed!" Ed says brightly.

" _Of course I'm alarmed_ , but  _we're in a library_." 

"Regardless," he says. "The power is out and we need to rig the Alchemists by hand, so I figured, since you're working with Catalina and all--"

Winry's school bag drops from her hand. "Wait. The  _power is out?_ At  _Central HQ?_ Is that even possible?"

"Unfortunately," Ed says. 

Watching Ed, Winry wishes she had a better grasp of metaphors. She's never been particularly poetic, or lyrical. She has her parents' practical mind, their taste for things concrete and real. The only thing she can think of is the occasional heat glimmer on asphalt on a hot day, how if you look at it from one angle you see a mirage, but at another, it's just the road. That's how she feels looking at Ed these days, how in certain lights he looks like a man, and in others he's still just a boy. It can change from conversation to conversation, from moment to moment, as has happened just now, as his joking evaporates and she finds herself not looking at Ed, her friend, but at Edward Elric, Alchemist Pilot, tasked with holding the fate of the world in his two small hands, one warm and one cold.

She finds it difficult to be upset with this person, standing new and remarkably tall in front of her, and so she says something that the Winry she knew, the tomboy, the silly little gearhead who baked apple pies and went to estate sales on the weekend, would never have said: "Do you need me there?"

And Edward Elric replies with something that he never would have said before either: "Of course."

* * *

In the candlelit war room, Invidia can't help but snicker a bit, looking at Wrath with his fingers steepled in front of his face, his visage all lines and shadows, like something out of a comic book.

"What are you laughing at?" he asks.

"I don't think your plan will work, that's all," Invidia says, taking a chair from the table and turning it around, straddling it and placing their head on the back. "We need bloodshed, right? How's that gonna happen if we keep Sloth in here? Why not sic him on the city?"

"You saw how well that worked with Lust."

"Lust enjoyed her job too much. Sloth is better at taking orders. So why keep him in here?"

"We could easily get rid of Mustang this way," Wrath explains lightly. "He and Captain Hawkeye are stuck in the elevator going between the engineering garage and the observation deck. Sloth should be getting to them soon enough."

"Well, what about Elric? The Colonel let him leave."

"Oh, he'll be here," Wrath promises.

"How do you know?"

"You really don't understand humans at all, do you, Envy?" Wrath says, unlacing his hands. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out his wallet, a black, unassuming leather thing, full of ID's and credit cards. Folded into a perfect square in the back, behind a stack of 2000  _cenz_ notes, is a photo, which he takes out and lays on the table, unfolding it and smoothing out the creases with all the care and gentleness of a rare collections librarian. He turns the photo around so that Envy can see it, and gently slides it across the table to them.

Envy picks it up like a crime scene investigator, between forefinger and thumb, as if it were somehow contaminated.

"That is called a 'family.'"

Envy scowls. "I'm not an idiot, you know."

"Sometimes I'm not so sure." Wrath leans back in his chair. He isn't looking at Envy anymore, instead looking out into the middle distance, somewhere above their head. "You never had a family, so you don't know what it's like. It's the strangest thing I've ever seen, the way these humans bond together. They'll do things that seem completely illogical, simply to protect each other."

"Humans are weak," Envy says, but at that Wrath snatches the photo back, carefully refolding it to a perfect square once again. "What? Are you saying you understand it? They would let this whole planet burn to the ground to save one person they like."

"That's what I'm banking on, actually," Wrath says, placing the photo once again behind the 2000  _cenz_ notes. "Captain Hawkeye has taken him in. The Elric boy hasn't had a family since he was small. Do you think he'd simply let her die now? He'll be here."

"You truly are cruel."

"Of course," he says with a smile he reserves for foreign delegates and his son's teachers. "Why do you think FATHER named me Wrath?"

Envy gets up and leaves after that. Wrath doesn't particularly like Envy, and Envy doesn't particularly like Wrath. He supposes that, technically, they could be called "siblings," though in nothing close to the human sense. No, he'll never truly understand why humans form families in the way that they do. In an earlier time, there may have been pragmatic uses for such an arrangement, but now, with their own world collapsing around them, what use would those tethers be, other than to hold weights to let them drown?

He opens his wallet, flipping past the  _cenz_ notes until he sees the square that holds Mrs. Bradley and Selim, before closing it and putting it away.

_Humans truly are such strange creatures._

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BOY HOWDY it is legitimately really embarrassing how long this chapter took for me to write. "Oh, spooky_bee, remember when you were going to update more regularly this summer?" you ask. Well, I'm super sorry, because that didn't happen. I went on vacation and moved and have basically been super fuckin busy and this fic has, unfortunately, not been at the top of my priority list because of that. I promise no consistent updates from here on out, because school starts next week, but this fic is not dead, I promise.
> 
> Also, as has been the case with everything I have tried to make a two-parter in this fic, the homunculus fight will actually continue on into the next chapter, because in the almost two months it took me to write this one, it got way out-of-hand-too-long, and I won't do that to you, or myself. So enjoy the cliffhanger, or whatever you want to call the end of this chapter.
> 
> The title for this chapter is the second half of the line from "I Will Bury You in Time" by Neutral Milk Hotel that was used as the title for the chapter before this one. The whole line is "You're near the brink of complete implosion, crown your king when your life is broken."


	14. Anemone

She only ever rebels in small ways.

When she was small, her mother joked and called her a "good little soldier," because she was never any trouble. This always made her father's nose curl, as if sniffing at a jug of milk left in the fridge and finding it sour. She has always been excellent at taking orders, at following rules, and so when she breaks them, she only ever bends them slightly, leaving the rule still fully intact, but now with enough room underneath to wiggle around it.

Despite the ample allowance that Christmas gives Mustang, they end up compromising on the quality of their flat to get a location closer to Central U's campus since he can't drive. Because of this, their air conditioning unit requires an act of God to work, and both Mustang and Riza are atheists. In order to escape the stagnation of their bedrooms, they have taken to making a pallet of blankets and pillows on the tile floor of the kitchen. With the window in their living room open it lets in a breeze, as well as a small colony of moths, which circle around their kitchen light before leaving, confused, once the lights go off for the night.

Riza has never been particularly high-maintenance, particularly when it comes to sleeping, but Mustang is delicate, and doesn't particularly enjoy their new sleeping arrangement.

"Sleeping on the floor is one thing," he says, settling down into his nest with a bitter face. "But tile?"

"If you hate it so much," she replies coolly, "go back to your room."

"But it's  _hot_ in my room."

"Then sleep on the tile."

He huffs, but complies.

Riza is fairly sure she that she could sleep anywhere, but for Mustang this isn't the case. She isn't hugely surprised; Mustang grew up having most of his childish whims catered to. Riza supposes that if she ever had any childish whims and could argue for them with enough persuasion that she probably could have gotten her way. Her parents appreciated solid rhetoric more than they appreciated strict parenting. But she never wanted much from her mother and father other than their presence, and that was the thing she was least likely to get from them. 

"This is terrible. I think I'm gonna go to the pool tomorrow; I'm not sure how much more I can stand." It's a Friday night and, for some reason, Mustang stayed in for once. As hot as it was, no one particularly wanted to go out, and Riza, who hadn't started college yet, had no one to go out with, and so they were together, sweating on the tile floor, waiting for the heat to abate long enough for them to snatch a few hours' sleep from the night's sticky hands.

"I don't know how to swim," she says, more as a filler to the silence than an invitation to discussion, but Mustang is horrified.

"You can't swim?"

Her eyes are closed, but she can hear him uncurling himself, the sound of skin on fabric on floor, as he sits up to look at her. "I lived in the mountains," she explains. "Before now, it never got very hot.  Why would I need to know how to swim?"

He makes a noise, somewhere between frustration and confusion, and lays back down. From the sound of it, he folded his arms behind his head. She isn't sure how a year is enough time to know a person simply from sound, but she can see him in her mind as if through echo location.

"Why does something have to be necessary for you to know it? Why can't you know something just for the sake of knowing it?"

She knows that he wants to pull an answer out of her and construct some midnight symposium out of it, some reason for his brain to keep whirring and for his body to stave off sleep for a little while longer, but she is tired, and doesn't feel like being his interlocutor for the night.

"Because, Roy," she says, rolling onto her side. She can hear the soft  _shh-_ ing of hair against a pillow, of a head turning to look at her, like the silky sound of wind rustling through trees.

"Fine," he says, "then tomorrow we're buying you a swimsuit and I'm teaching you how to swim."

"Okay, Roy," she says around a yawn before burying her face in her pillow, unable to muster up enough energy to argue with him. "Okay."

The next day they head out into the sweltering, pulsing heart of the city. She has to persuade him to avoid the little swim boutiques that his sisters frequent, because she doesn't have that kind of money, and the thought of being in a store full of slim-waisted, stylish women makes her uncharacteristically nervous. She isn't necessarily self-conscious about her appearance, but her own lack of self-consciousness makes her, bizarrely, self-conscious. She is un-self-conscious in the most literal sense of the term, in that she isn't particularly fond of thinking about herself, at least not physically. That kind of attention she doesn't think is worth her time. Not that her time is worth much at the moment: she spends her days studying, dawdling around their apartment, and browsing the internet for jobs. She at least wants to contribute, no matter how much Mustang tells her that Christmas has more than enough money to front their rent. She wasn't raised to take well to indolence.

After going to a few stores she settles on a simple, navy one-piece. Other than a small cut-out in the lower back, it is almost completely plain, and Mustang turns up his nose at it.

"You're gonna look like a lifeguard in that."

"What's wrong with lifeguards?"

He looks at her as if she's grown another head, which she thinks is unwarranted. So what if she doesn't want to wear a bikini? She doubts that after today she'll ever even wear a swimsuit again. The only reason she's here is because he won't leave her alone about the fact that she can't swim. She figured he would've forgotten since he brought it up in the middle of the night, but that morning over breakfast he had brought it up again and wouldn't let it go. Since that is the case she thinks that she should be able to wear whatever kind of swimsuit she wants. 

"They have to wear those kinds of suits for a reason," Mustang elaborates, as if explaining something very simple to a toddler. "Don't you want something a little...I don't know, cuter?"

"Not really, no."

She expects him to try to argue with her about the merits of cute swimsuits, but he concedes with a sigh and turns around to walk to the cash register.

Technically, the Central University pool is only open for university students. That being said, Roy Mustang isn't stupid. The transformation came slow, although it felt much slower than it actually was, but when it did, he slipped off boyhood with surprising momentum. He knew very little about his parents, and cared about them even less, but he had to be at least a little grateful for their genes. They were generous in that regard, at least, and he took a surprising amount of pride in knowing that they'd never know what a handsome, intelligent, and hopefully-successful man he had grown into. But he was the frightening product of his parents' genes and Chris Mustang's raising, meaning that he knew full well how attractive he was, and he knew even better how to use that to his advantage. And so he knew that the upperclassman who worked the desk at the pool (did backstroke for the swim team, too; Roy also inherited his foster mother's open ears) had a bit of a crush on him, and that could be easily exploited for special privileges.

There could have been an easier way into the pool, they both knew this, but Mustang decided that this way would be the most fun, and a part of him wanted to see Riza scandalized. Riza Hawkeye, the little mountain-girl, who, as far as he knew, had never been kissed, was so unfazed by most things. She wasn't impressed with him, and wasn't scandalized by him, either. The most he ever got out of her was the occasional huff of frustration, the sporadic roll of those absurd, tawny eyes of hers. 

As per usual, she didn't bat an eye as he slipped a fraternal arm around her slim shoulders and lied about her being his sister (honestly, Riza Hawkeye, one of the single most Amestrian-looking people in the world, being  _his sister_ ) while flirting with the poor bastard behind the reception desk. Even openly flirting with another man didn't faze her.

She had tried to convince him that this was probably unethical. The poor guy didn't deserve to be manipulated in the way that Mustang was toying with him. Nobody did, honestly. But maybe she just doesn't understand what precisely is happening. She knows that she's no incredible beauty, and it's never really bothered her. Sure, she has tits, and sometimes that's enough to distract men enough to get what you want from them, but she doesn't like doing that. She also doesn't have the same kind of lazy, unaffected charm that Mustang possesses, the weird sort of gravity that makes others bend their orbits toward him, attracting satellites like stray cats. Watching him spin off grander and grander lies, and watching the swimmer guy eat them out of the palm of his hand, is breathtaking in a bizarre kind of way.

But, perhaps most bizarre of all, is that it  _works_. She remembers one of the old idioms her grandfather would say about the politicians in East City, that the truly influential ones could convince you that the moon was green and you'd think that you had just been seeing it wrong for your whole life. That's how she feels about Roy Mustang. The way he speaks, as if he is always letting you in on a secret, there's something intoxicating about it. He has inherited the single most dangerous skill he could from his sisters: Roy Mustang is an expert at making you feel special.

It's a strange predicament to be in, because for most of her life, Riza has not felt very special at all. She never even knew that she was different from most kids until the research assistants on the  _Flamel_ pointed it out to her. Mustang may be an ass, but he's definitely  _special_ , whatever that means. Riza thinks that she's still pretty ordinary, but she's somehow managed to find herself stuck in his orbit, a piece of cosmic debris he picked up and for some reason never shook off. Looking at herself in the mirror of the women's locker room in her lifeguard-plain swimsuit, she marvels at the strangeness of the universe, of the things that have led her here. No matter what angle she looks at it from, it never begins to make any more sense, and so she pads out to the pool, bare feet feeling slippery and unsettled on the wet concrete. Nowhere is the pool hugely deep, mainly comprised of lanes for the university swim team, but she realizes, staring into the pool, that this is the first time she's been near a body of water bigger than a bathtub since her mother died. 

"You scared of water, Hawkeye?" Mustang jokes, coming up beside her so quietly that she hadn't realized he was there until he spoke.

"Not exactly," she replies, voice level. "Me and water just haven't always gotten along, is all."

"It's really a lot easier than you'd think," he says. They are standing in front of a patch of water that was only four feet deep, which was shallow enough for both of them to stand head and shoulders above the water. He sits on the lip of the pool before slipping gently into the water, barely even making a splash, the water allowing him in almost politely. 

With a small bit of trepidation that she hides behind her usual impassive face, she does the same, shivering slightly as the cool water licks at her waist.

"Try floating on your back," he suggests. "It's easy."

She studies his face, searching for a lie. "I'll sink."

He laughs. "And here I thought you were so scientific. You should know that the air in your lungs will keep you afloat."

"I don't believe you."

"Come on, Riza, I'm serious. Why would I lie to you?"

"Because you think it'd be funny to see me sink."

"There's only four feet of water here. You wouldn't even be able to sink that far. Plus, do you really think I'm that much of a jackass?" He truly sounds a bit offended.

She isn't frightened, necessarily, but she could see him bringing her out here just to make a fool out of her, to watch her flounder and try not to drown in four feet of chlorinated water. He probably has to re-right the world for allowing her to feel too special. The hierarchy of beings needs to be shifted back to its original state.

"This was a stupid idea," she says, crossing her arms over her chest, both to telegraph her annoyance and hide the fact that she's still shivering.

"Hey," he says, dropping the Mustang shtick for a moment to look at her through the eyes of the boy she had met a year before, before turning into the man standing in front of her.  "I'm sorry for laughing at you." Occasionally she wonders why she still puts up with him. More often than not he's more pain than he's worth. But it's this, this look in his eyes like she is the only person in the world worth trusting, that must have won over the swimmer at the front desk. It's the kind of look that sends armies willingly marching off to their death, that convinces people to leave behind their peaceful lives to join a revolution. He looks at her like this and she feels like she has been picked for something much bigger than herself. It's a feeling that never stops being dazzling, as much as she wishes that she could stop being dazzled by him. "Watch." He leans back, letting his feet lift from the floor of the pool and allowing his weight to be supported by the water. 

It's like watching a magic trick: the amazing levitating boy. He may as well be floating on air to her, sitting atop the water like a corpse on a bier. It looks so effortless, just like everything else he does. But where she lives with him, she gets to peek behind the curtain. She knows the amount of work that goes into maintaining a piece of work like Roy Mustang. It looks exhausting. But he looks inexplicably peaceful there, letting the water shoulder the weight for a while instead of carrying all of it himself. It's strange, how proud he is. That is one part of his act that is totally genuine, and he only ever lets her help when he can't notice that she's helping.

"That was amazing," she says when he rights himself again, and she means it. The way he trusts the water that much is honestly astounding to her. She can't imagine trusting anything that much.

"Not really," he says, running a hand through his hair so that it sticks up in damp little spikes. "It's just science."

"It looks like witchcraft to me."

"Your father would be turning in his grave if he heard you say that."

She can't help but smirk a little at that. "Good."

Mustang is taken aback at that. He always is whenever she says something mean or disrespectful, as if it could really be so surprising that she feels anything other than the purest, most virtuous of emotions. She's human too, and she's allowed to feel bitter toward her father. She's allowed to be angry, or sad, or anything else, and she thinks that sometimes he forgets that because she doesn't perform her emotions with the same kind of vividness that he does.

He looks a little bit scandalized by that (she always forgets that he, unlike her, has memories of her father to love, a ghost to nurture and ply with sweets; she swiftly gets rid of her father's memory whenever it shows its shadowy head in her doorstep or in her dreams), and that makes her feel braver and a little bit risqué. She, Riza Hawkeye, the little Western girl living in the big city and pretending to have her life together, has scandalized Roy Mustang, whose middle name might as well be "Scandal." He always surprises her with his occasional bursts of nobility, as if they were some sort of nervous tic he was never able to shake, no matter how urbane and flippant he might make himself out to be.

"I want to try now," she says, straightening her spine and unfolding her eyes. She's knocked him off of his footing and now feels like she can approach him as an equal, not as a pupil.

It takes him a moment to respond, but when he does he extends a hand to her. "Okay, come over here and I'll help you." She takes several slow, watery steps in his direction, until they are standing an arm's length apart. She realizes, oddly, that this is the closest proximity they have ever been to each other. It was as if she had a magnetic polarity identical to his, and any time they came close they always managed to push each other away again without noticing. He places a tentative hand between her shoulder blades and she feels the muscles underneath her swimsuit tense and then loosen again. "I'm gonna keep my hand under your back so that you don't freak out and start sinking, okay? Just lean back into my hand. I'll keep you afloat."

She flicks her eyes up to his. He isn't significantly taller than her, but there is enough of a difference that she looks up at him through the shade of her eyelashes, giving his face a faint golden sheen. "You promise?"

"Of course," he says.  "I'd never let you sink."

She leans back, his hand following her body into the water. It slides down her spine until it rests on the keyhole at her lower back, skin against skin, and the shock at being touched is almost enough to send her floundering. Sure, she bumps into passersby and occasionally someone's leg knocks against hers on the Tunnel, but she hadn't realized until that moment how infrequently she feels real skin-to-skin contact. The water is very cold as she is laid back, but Mustang's hand is very warm at her  spine.

She tries not to panic as she feels the water come up over her ears, but then the water doesn't stop coming. It comes over her ears, then over her mouth and nose. Startled, she opens her eyes, and finds herself staring up not at the ceiling of the Central University pool, but at water, dark blue and salty, stinging her eyes. The warmth at her back is gone, and as she looks around, so is Mustang. Around her in every direction, above and below, is only water. She can't swim, and she's fast running out of air, and so she panics, opening her mouth to take a breath she knows isn't there, but her lungs are burning, and her eyes are burning, and she's in the middle of the ocean, why is everything burning--

She bolts upright, hands gripping at starchy bedsheets, lungs greedily sucking down air, not water. Her eyes open to see Mustang sitting in the same chair she had been sitting in weeks before, legs and arms crossed. Upon locking eyes with him, a sharp pain begins to blossom above her left eye, and so she lays back down, eyes shut against the harsh fluorescent lights above her.

"How's it feel to be on the other side of the hospital bed for once?" Mustang asks, sounding surprisingly smug considering the circumstances.

Her breathing and heartbeat are still unsteady as she comes down from the dream, but she manages to say "Fucking terrible" with only minimal warble in her voice. Slowly, her situation begins to stitch itself together. "Why am I in the hospital?"

"What's the last thing you remember?"

She thinks around the pounding in her skull. "We were in the elevator and...it started shaking and we got tossed to the side."

He nods. "When we got thrown down, you hit your head on the side of the elevator and got knocked out. I figured you were probably okay, but I wanted you to get checked out just to make sure. How are you feeling?"

"Other than a brutal headache, I feel fine. What happened, anyway? Did they get the power outage fixed?"

He doesn't respond immediately, and so she braves the lights to crack her eyes a bit. "What is it?"

He scrunches up his mouth, as if sucking on a sour candy, before finally admitting "You were right. Someone  _had_ broken into Central HQ. Well, I guess 'some _thing'_ would be more appropriate."

The ache in her head is now no match for the knot in her stomach. "Some  _thing_?"

His eyes go oddly dull as he says "There was a homunculus in Central HQ. It dug through the ground into the engineering department, and it tried to crush the elevator we were trapped in. That's why it started shaking. That's also why the power was out. It had been digging for days."

"What?" She fights the urge to say "that isn't possible," because clearly it is. There would be no point in saying something that is obviously untrue. It's just that Central HQ had always functioned as a calm, stable point in the world for her. Everywhere outside, above ground, could be crumbling to dust, but even if that happens, there's still Central-2, glowing deep in the bowels of HQ, humanity's last bastion if necessary. But it suddenly feels as if it's no more than a baby in the belly of their organization, something small and fragile that could potentially save them, but could just as well be their undoing, something that could very easily be knocked out of existence, and then where would they be?

"We think that--"

"It was trying to get to Central-2," she finishes for him.

He looks slightly stunned at her correctly anticipating what he was going to say, as if he were prepared to tell her something top-secret. But she knows. Of course she knows. "Yes."

"How would it even know about that?  _You_ didn't even know about it until I told you."

"We aren't sure," he says, but then amends: "Well,  _I'm_ not sure, and neither are the people who have talked to me about it."

"What are you suggesting?"

His eyes flick to the door of her hospital room, which is open. She knows what that gesture means:  _not here, it isn't safe._ The other half of that statement-- _we'll talk about it later_ \--is ambiguous, however. He has developed a worrying tendency over the last few years (and with frightening expediency over the last year or so in particular) to hide things from her, things she should know. She still feels occasionally as if they are one organism, like conjoined twins: separate consciousnesses with interconnected veins, shared blood. But recently it as if he has slowly been tearing himself away from her, or, in less severe terms, building small walls between them. Before they were a large, reasonably happy country, but now they have split into two smaller, less happy nations, with cordial but uncertain borders.  _What happened to you?_ she thinks.  _I used to be able to see you without looking at you_.  _Now I can hardly see you with my eyes open._

"We'll talk about this later," she says and begins to fold back the sheets on her bed, legs starting to swing around to the side when Mustang stops her.

"What are you doing?"

"Getting out of bed," she says flatly, bare feet connecting with cool hospital tile. 

"No you're not," he says with a slight, nervous laugh.

She blinks several times. Her head still aches, but her eyes have started to adjust at least. "Excuse me?" she asks. "You're my subordinate; you can't order me around."

"That may be true, but I'm also your friend, and I worry about you."

"Don't," she says, and it comes out sharper than she intended. She exhales a long breath she hadn't realized she had been holding. Her abdominal muscles have been tensed since she woke up, and even with deep breaths they remain tied in sailor's knots. "I'm sorry. I'm just a little...tense."

"I noticed."

She doesn't like worrying people. It isn't their responsibility. She especially doesn't like that Mustang is worried about her. The whole thing seems laughably ironic; Mustang should be worrying about himself first and foremost, but for some reason his denial is so strong that he feels the need to extend his worry to her. She's fine. She just got knocked in the head, and occasionally it feels as if she's constantly wading through a swamp thick with fear and things she can't see lurking in the water, but those problems are hers and hers alone. She's honestly slightly offended that Mustang thinks that he has his life together enough to critique hers.

"You should be thrilled," he says, pulling on a smirk so forced-looking that Riza can't help but laugh a little. "I'm not avoiding you anymore, am I?"

"I suppose that's true." She would never admit it to anyone--least of all him--that she had missed seeing him around in those first few days after Hughes's death. Whatever their work relationship is or isn't, they are friends, and she cares for him deeply. Watching him suffer alone without knowing why, without knowing how to help, made her feel sick. "Although 'thrilled' may be a bit of an exaggeration." It both was and wasn't an overstatement. Few things thrilled Riza Hawkeye: shooting a bullseye on the first try, whenever Hayate actually complies and performs the tricks she tells him to, watching Ed pilot his Alchemist with no problems, just smooth synchronization and blinding power. She thinks that Roy Mustang might also make that list. But they can only be so honest with each other, and so they joke.

"You're not going to stay in here even if I beg, are you?"

"I only saw you ask. I didn't see you beg."

There's a strange glint in Mustang's eye, something mischievous and undomesticated that she can't place. Being friends with Mustang requires an almost compulsive desire to catalogue countless glances, tics, movements of the hands, and postures. For someone who speaks so much, and oftentimes quite eloquently, Mustang tends to be just as talkative with his body, and generally more honest. He walks slowly, almost regally, from his side of the room to hers, as if there were a great weight sitting heavy on his shoulders that leadens his steps. As he approaches the edge of her bed, he gently, delicately, drops to a knee and reaches up to take one of her hands in both of his. The gesture is somehow both hilariously theatrical and oddly tender, and it makes the knots in Riza's stomach tie themselves even tighter, brings the desert back into her throat.

"Riza Hawkeye," he says, voice dropped down to the richest depths of his baritone, a register that makes the hairs on Riza's arms stand up. "Will you please, please, _please_ stay in bed and rest like a sensible human being?"

She smiles as beatifically as she can muster, allowing him to at least pretend that he won for a moment before taking her other hand and placing it on top of his. She squeezes his knuckles gently before saying "No," and disentangling their fingers.

"I would expect nothing less from you," he says remaining on his knee.

"And I would hate to disappoint." She walks over to the chair he had been sitting in before and looks around. "Where are my things?"

He stands up, dusting off his jeans despite the fact that they're just as immaculately rumpled as everything else he owns, even after kneeling on a hospital floor. "Not here."

"What do you mean?"

"I knew that you'd try to run off if you had access to your car keys, so they're not here."

"Where are they?"

"With Rebecca."

"So I'm stuck here?"

"'Stuck' has such a negative connotation to it--"

"I'm stuck here."

"Well, look at it this way: I'm stuck here too, so at least you won't be alone."

"I like being alone."

He chuckles. "I'll never understand that about you. Don't you ever get lonely?"

"I don't have time to get lonely," she says, and she isn't trying to be glib; she means it. Loneliness doesn't creep around the edges of her life in the same way it stalks Mustang. For Riza, loneliness was like a member of her family, an aging aunt or uncle, who for some reason lived in their home. It started off being unpleasant and unnatural, but eventually became an accepted part of her childhood, as normal and thoughtless as the number of stairs leading to her bedroom, or which light switch corresponded to the ceiling fan. For Mustang though, loneliness plagued him like a chronic illness, something that constantly needed to be mitigated and managed. That's why he always kept the lights on, kept music playing. 

He and Hughes had lived together briefly in a nice little townhouse on the outskirts of the city center, somewhere quieter, close to where the remains of the Hughes family lives now, but after they broke up, Mustang moved into one of the military-issue apartment buildings that she lives in, an exact copy, in fact. She always wondered why he would downgrade so dramatically. Riza never minded the military apartments too badly. Even they were an upgrade from where she had lived with Mustang when they were in college. But for Mustang it seemed odd that he would do this. Now that Riza thinks about it more, she thinks that, perhaps, Mustang had turned into kind of a den animal: with less space, there's less space to be empty; with fewer rooms, there are fewer rooms to be left unoccupied. With a smaller, shabbier apartment, his loneliness is less conspicuous.

"Well, then being stuck in a hospital will force you to rest."

"Rest is overrated."

"I would disagree."

Riza sighs, but without her car, resistance s ultimately futile, and so she walks back to the bed and sits down on the edge of it. "I have nothing to do. I didn't exactly bring a book anticipating being bed-ridden."

Mustang smiles, grin smug and dark eyes twinkling. He reaches into his bag (a smart leather backpack) and withdraws a beat-up paperback, tossing it to her. She catches it deftly, turning it over in her hands. " _Gone Girl_?" she asks and then, running a thumb over the corner of the book, finds most of the pages to be dog-eared. "Isn't this mine?"

"Yup. You loaned it to me a couple years ago and I forgot to give it back to you. I stopped by my apartment before coming here, saw it serving as a level for my kitchen table, and brought it with me. I have made immense sacrifices for your enjoyment; now my table is at a slight angle. I'll be spilling my coffee until you give it back to me."

"Did you read it?" she asks, looking up at him.

"What do you think?"

"Of course. I forgot that you have more transcendental taste in literature."

He shrugs. "Mysteries just aren't my thing. I have enough mysteries to deal with." He takes his backpack and slings it cavalierly over a single shoulder. "But I'm on the edge of sleep, so I'm going to brave the sludge that they call coffee here."

"Good luck," she says, opening the wrinkled, cracked cover of her book and settling back against the headboard of her bed.

Mustang is halfway out the door before he stops suddenly, his hand reaching out and catching the doorframe, as if something caught him unexpectedly.

"Did you forget something?" she asks.

"Sort of," he says, turning around, still in the doorway, as if contemplating a quick escape. "There's something you should know."

She knew it. She knew that a homunculus breaking into Central HQ (and almost getting to Central-2 no less) couldn't go this smoothly. It was suspicious. She knew that something had to have gone terribly wrong, someone must have gotten hurt, something--

"I told Edward."

She expected to hear tell of death and destruction, and so it takes her a second to catch up with his logic. "What?"

"About Hughes. I told Edward about Hughes. That he's dead."

"Oh."

She feels deflated, as if all the air has left her lungs, all the blood left her veins. She feels that if a particularly strong gust of wind caught her at that moment she'd blow away.

Mustang stands silently in the doorway for a moment, studying the grid of the tile, before saying "I'm going to go get that coffee" and leaving.

Riza stares at the place where his silhouette had been before looking down at her book and closing it.

* * *

Ed isn't sure why songs for children are always so grim. It seems like every lullaby is about death, and usually death that comes in horrible ways. Even "rock a'bye baby" is about some poor infant whose cradle is in a tree for some reason, and if a strong breeze comes by, the infant will fall and die. Jack and Jill and ring-around-the-rosie are also about people, usually children, meeting terrible fates. It's the sort of thing you never give much thought as a child, because you don't have to. Until a certain point, "death" is just some bizarre, abstract concept, something that affects people on the news or in storybooks, but never  _you_ , and certainly never people you know.

As a child, parents are the people most removed from death. Parents created the world, created you, and so the concept of parents encountering destruction always seems impossible. Edward Elric learned hard and learned young that this was not the case, first when his father left (at a time when he had only newly acquired object permanence, and then was considering whether to get rid of it or not, as it hadn't served him particularly well) and then when his mother died. Loss has been a part of his life for as long as he can remember, and it makes looking back at the songs he and Al heard when they were children seem particularly macabre, as if they were being primed from birth for the tragedy that they would experience later in life.

But he thinks, lying back on the bed that he shares with Al, listening to the old cassette of Eastern folk songs that Winry found for him, that most children don't live lives like that. Most people experience grief, but the edges of it are generally buffeted down by the majority of their experiences being pleasant, so that they don't feel the need to fixate so much upon sorrow and mortality. Why, then, are songs for children so preoccupied with death?

It's something that Ed has been thinking a lot about recently, particularly in the day since the Sloth sortie. He is tired of watching people he loves die, and when he pried open the elevator of the engineering garage with the Fullmetal Alchemist's behemoth metal hands and saw an unconscious Riza, laid out across Mustang's lap like some kind of  _pietà_ , bleeding from her head, he was convinced that it had happened again. Looking down at Mustang cradling Riza's limp body, his sync rate immediately bottomed out, the shoulders of the Alchemist hunching over and the head bowing as it no longer had a neural link with its pilot. Before that happened, however, in the split second between when he felt his heart drop and the Alchemist felt the same, he saw something feral and naked run across Mustang's face, just for a moment, but it confirmed something that Edward had suspected for a while.

He didn't have much time to dwell on it, however, as Mustang was carrying Riza out of the elevator and laying her at the feet of the Alchemist before running to find someone who could get Ed out and get Riza medical attention. He could see, then, from the dim entry plug, that Riza's chest was slowly rising and falling. She was still alive. 

Ed had insisted upon following Mustang to the hospital so that he could make sure Riza was alright, wanted his fears assuaged. And they were, at least somewhat. Riza had a mild concussion, but nothing life threatening, and all she needed was some rest.

"Fullmetal," Mustang had said, voice unusually flat, devoid of his usual theatrical fluctuations in tone. He wasn't looking at Ed, was instead looking at Riza's sleeping face with a kind of tense wonder. Ed could understand that; catching Riza Hawkeye sleeping was a rare occurrence, and so to see her like this had to be strange, like seeing someone who normally wore makeup bare-faced. When she was sleeping, Riza looked like any other woman. It was almost difficult to believe the level of power, the amount of responsibility, she possessed when she was just lying there, eyelids occasionally fluttering, but with no other signs of the sharp mind that lay within her sleeping head. "Let's go out into the hall."

"Why?" Ed asked.

"She needs to rest. We shouldn't disturb her."

If it had been anyone else in that bed, if it had been any other time, then Ed would have argued with him, would bring up that she had sat and waited for the both of them when they were hospitalized, and didn't that seem like something of a double standard? But, frankly, Ed was exhausted, and didn't feel as eager as usual to argue with Mustang.

"Yeah, fine," Ed replied, digging his hands into his pockets. Mustang unstuck his gaze from Riza and turned on his heels slowly, as if unsure of whether he wanted to fully execute the action or not, but soon fell into his usual springy gait, with Edward following him slouchily a few paces behind.

As they walked, Mustang looked over his shoulder at Ed. "Do you want some coffee?"

Ed did, in fact, want coffee. He was tired, and the caffeine would be appreciated (even though Winry always told him that coffee would stunt his growth), but Ed could see dark circles under Mustang's eyes, and new ones, too. Mustang always took meticulous care of his appearance, and was notorious for napping on the job, and so this was a vaguely foreboding sign. Somehow this made him want coffee less. The longer he looked at Mustang's face, the more he began to notice signs of wear: lines at his forehead and around his eyes, and even a grey hair or two. He looked tired.

Mustang stopped walking. "What?"

Ed shook his head. "Nothing. I'll pass on the coffee."

Mustang shrugged lazily, as if even that most minute of gestures cost him a taxing amount of energy. "Suit yourself."

Mustang braved the somewhat dubious hospital coffee, but drank it all in a matter of minutes, silently, and Ed was starting to wonder why he had been pulled out here in the first place. Mustang's explanation of Hawkeye "needing her rest" (as if someone who had been knocked out could possibly be stirred by them talking at a normal human volume) seemed rather flimsy, but he also didn't seem particularly ready to bring up some sort of ulterior motive either.

Mustang crumpled the styrofoam cup loudly in his hand, tossing it into a nearby trashcan with an enervated sort of grace. "You know, Fullmetal, I never gave you much credit. You reminded me too much of myself. You're the kind of kid I look at and I know that you were told one too many times that you were wise beyond your years. But..." He laughed, a dry, bitter sound, like stepping on a twig you hadn't seen in the middle of the road and hearing it snap. "You know what? Those people may have been right. You  _are_ wise beyond your years in a lot of ways. And so that's why I'm apologizing."

Ed felt, not for the first time with Mustang, that he was somehow out of the loop despite being the only other person in the conversation. Ed liked to believe that he was always a step ahead, but with Mustang it was like there was another half step ahead of that that he hadn't accounted for. "Apologizing for what?"

"For lying to you."

"Lying to me?"

"Hughes is dead."

Ed laughed. "What are you talking about? No he's not! I saw him just a..." He tried to think. When  _was_ the last time he saw Hughes, exactly?

"He's dead, Ed. He was shot. We don't know by who, but he's dead. I'm sorry."

Mustang was a habitual liar, and Ed knew as much, but he wouldn't lie about this. He may have been a melodramatic bastard, but he also had an unshakable core of human decency, and he wouldn't lie about this. "I...how long?"

"About a week."

In the schema of fight or flight, Ed had always been a fighter. It didn't matter the size of the problem, be it insignificant or far too big for him to handle. It also didn't matter whether he was with a person with whom fighting would be beneficial. Mustang was there, and the news sat hot and slick in his stomach, making him feel sick and angry and betrayed and  _hurt_. He felt hurt in the purest form of a child whose parents have just lied to them for the first time. No, not the first time; the first time they realized they had been lied to. The first time they realized that adults were just as pocked full of flaws as anyone else. And so he fought.

He gripped at the collar of Mustang's shirt, pulling with enough force to drag Mustang onto the balls of his feet, even though he had over half a foot on Ed. His fists and knees were shaking, and he could feel something sharp and acidic pricking at the back of his throat, but he didn't care. He had the overwhelming urge to punch Mustang in the face, but he knew, consciously, that he didn't deserve it. He just needed to punch something, needed to flex his own personal agency and efficacy, because this was all the proof he needed that the universe truly was working against him and din't care about his feelings and there was very little he could do about that fact.

Mustang's face remained impassive, his hands laying open and limp at his sides, clearly having no intention to fight Ed, regardless of what Ed chose to do himself. 

"Why didn't you  _tell_ me?" Ed pleaded.

"We didn't want to rattle you. After the sortie with Lust, we saw that your emotional state affects your sync rates more than is normal for a pilot, and we didn't want to trouble you with the news."

"You didn't want to  _trouble me?_ " Ed bit through the words like tearing into a small animal, something helpless and fleshy. "He was my friend, too, Mustang! God, I stayed with his family. His wife baked us a quiche."

The hands around Mustang's collar fell open, slowly, like flowers opening up, and Mustang was lowered gently back to the ground.

"I..." Ed's voice was unstable in a way that Mustang had never heard it before. He sounded like a child, frightened and unsure. "What about Elicia? What is she going to do? Who's going to walk her down the aisle when she gets married?" The instability in his throat tumbled over, like a glass being knocked by a stray hand, and Ed's composure broke. He had never intended for Mustang to see him cry, but he also never intended for Hughes to die. He's had quite enough of death.

He's been lying in bed, listening to the music of his mother's lullaby for the last hour or so, trying vainly to remember the words yet again. He doesn't think the lullaby his mother would have picked would have been about death. She was such a vibrant woman, Ed can remember that clearly enough. She was full of hope for the future, for him and Al. She never would have sang them songs about grief.

He hits pause and slips off the headphones, pushing himself off the bed and padding into the living room. Assembled there is Winry, Al, and Rebecca Catalina, who had been put in charge of taking them all home and watching them while Riza was in the hospital. Rebecca was detachedly petting Black Hayate, who lay fitfully in her lap, as if the absence of his master unnerved him as much as it unnerved his human companions.

"I'm going out for a walk," Ed announced.

Al looked up from the book he was reading. "Do you want some company?"

"No, I think I'm going to go this one alone. Need to clear my head."

"Are you sure?" Winry asks. Ed knows that, if he wanted, both Al and Winry would come with him, but he feels like this is something he should do alone. As Winry has kindly informed him, he thinks this too often, but this is different. He isn't planning on accomplishing anything, on fighting anything.

"Yeah, I'm sure. Thanks, Win."

Winry gives him a small smile, one that says that she's there if he needs her. Even with everything that has happened, Ed can't say that he doesn't feel profoundly loved, not just by Winry, but by everyone in this room, even Rebecca Catalina.

"Keep your phone on you," Rebecca says. "That way we can keep you posted if anything happens."

Ed lets out a long breath. "You know, maybe I should just turn my phone off, then. I think I'm done with things happening for a little while."

* * *

In all the time she has known him (which sometimes feels like it's been forever, as if they were both placed on the earth at the same moment, and sometimes feels like the only way she could truly know so little about him is if they had just met), Riza has never been well acquainted with Mustang's silence. Even when he showed up at her father's house as a grave eighteen-year-old, he had somehow managed to monopolize every conversation he was in. With her that wasn't hard. Most days she didn't have much to say. When he first showed up, nothing had happened to her for four years. Of course she didn't have much to say to him then. But even at eighteen, Roy Mustang had stories to spare, and he spun them out like candy floss to her, weightless and sweet, and she ate them up greedily. Even after all his childhood stories had been told, and they started to accumulate the same stories, he always had something to say, some clever, glittery remark about the weather, or would rattle off a detailed review of some band she had never heard of. Very rarely was Mustang ever rendered speechless.

Which is why this is all the more bizarre.

He did finally return with the coffee as he had promised, handing it to her with a grin that was more akin to a grimace, a kind of facial way of saying "I know this stuff tastes like sewage, but it's the best we've got." She had drank it, not feeling all that rested after her bizarre dream. She remembered, vaguely, Mustang having taught her to swim, but it wasn't something she thought about very much. She's not sure why her brain decided to take that most innocuous of memories and turn it into a nightmare, but, then again, Riza has never claimed to understand her brain.

After drinking her coffee, she had settled into her book. She had read it before, and so knew all the plot twists, but could at least savor the writing. Mustang had been messing around on his phone, occasionally breaking the silence to read her a news article or share something funny, but otherwise not attempting to engage her in conversation. This was odd for him as, even though they have known each other for so long, share the same circle of friends, and share the same place of business, he seemingly always has things to tell her. And, from what he had implied earlier, he very clearly  _does_ have things to tell her, but if they're of any serious importance (she saw the look on his face, they were) Central's military hospital is probably not the best place to do it.

Still, the silence hasn't been uncomfortable. It almost feels like it did when he lived with her back when they were in college. They would sit in the living room of their dingy apartment, each doing their own homework (or, more accurately, Riza would be doing her homework, and Mustang would be trying valiantly to find ways to get out of doing his). Sometimes Mustang would haul his little portable turntable in and put it on the coffee table and would spin something. Riza wishes now that she could remember some of the things that he played on those muggy nights, deep into the small hours of the morning when they had spent the evenings goofing off and had a paper due or a test the next day. Riza would make them both coffee, and he would play music, and they would keep each other awake, Mustang complaining loudly about the unfairness of life or his own ineptitude, and Riza nodding along in commiseration, not looking up from her textbooks.

She wishes she could remember some of those songs now. It's so funny how songs lie dormant in your head, but all it takes is one time hearing them again and suddenly it's like you never stopped listening to them in the first place.

There is a series of small, polite knocks on the door, but the echo that follows is undeniably that of metal hitting wood. Riza looks up from her book.

"Could you--"

"I'll get it," Mustang says, pocketing his phone and rising from his chair.

Riza knows before the door is opened who will be standing there, and she has to brace herself for it. This was the thing she was dreading the most when Mustang told her that he had told Ed about Hughes. Ed has the tendency to see the world in black and white. She doubts that he would understand what they were thinking in keeping Hughes's death from him, and knows that he's going to resent her for it. After all the work she put into trying to get him to trust her, she worries that all of it may be for naught now. 

Ed looks tired and somewhat conciliatory as he stands just outside of the doorway. Mustang is almost completely blocking her view, hand clasped firmly on the door.

"Hello, Ed," Riza says.

Ed is staring at the floor, which is unusual for him. Ed likes to look people in the eye, likes people to know that he can stand his ground despite being so small and young. "Can I talk to Riza?" he asks, voice reticent.

"Shouldn't you be asking her that?" Mustang asks.

Ed looks up, past Mustang, to meet her eyes. His eyes are red, like he's been crying, or he hasn't slept. Maybe both. "Can I talk to you?"

"Of course," Riza responds. Even though she's sure that he hates her now, she still cares about him enough to not deny him her attention. Ed walks slowly into the room, shuffling his feet along the tile. She turns her gaze to Mustang. "Do you mind giving us some privacy?"

He looks as if he's considering saying no, but eventually nods and says "I'll be outside if you need me," before walking out and closing the door behind him.

Never being one for beating around the bush when there are important things to be said, Riza launches right into it. "So I heard that Mustang told you about Hughes." It honestly makes sense that she's so good with rifles; it feels like all she does these days is fell the elephants in every room she walks into. Ed nods, not saying anything. She thinks that if she were a bit more rested, if the caffeine didn't make her so jittery, she would be able to handle this whole situation more maturely, but she doesn't have the energy or the desire to do so at the moment, and so she says, "I would understand if you hated me now. Hated the both of us, me and Mustang. I can't say I would react much differently if I were in your shoes."

He doesn't say anything at first, and Riza thinks that must be tacit agreement with her statement. She can't blame him, she really can't. Empathy has never been her strong suit, and so she can't imagine what that must feel like, to have two authority figures you trusted lie to you about the death of a friend. That's horrible.  _She's_ horrible. But that isn't what he says.

"When I opened up the elevator compartment, after we had beaten Sloth, I saw you unconscious and I thought you were dead." Riza doesn't know how to respond to that. "It was like...it was like watching my mom die all over again. I couldn't think straight, and my sync rate dropped and the Alchemist stopped working. But then Mustang went to get help and I saw that you were breathing, and I thought that, just for once, maybe things weren't as bad as I thought they were. I wouldn't know what to do if you died. You've taken such good care of me and Winry and Al. I could never hate you."

Riza's mouth falls open slightly. There is something heavy sitting on her heart, something that is making it difficult for her to breathe or swallow, and she thinks that Ed must be feeling the same thing, as his eyes are glistening with moisture. "You're not allowed to die," he says, just as the first few tears begin to bubble in the corners of his eyes.

"You either," Riza says. Her eyes are dry (she very rarely cries, even in instances like this where she thinks that she might want to), but her throat is tight.

And then something miraculous happens. Edward Elric, tiny ball of fury and genius and love, walks up to her and wraps his arms tightly around her torso and begins to cry. After a moment of shock at what has just happened, she reaches up and begins to stroke the back of his head, gently. "It's alright," she says, and she isn't sure of whether it's a lie or not, so she repeats it to see if it feels any truer the second time around. "It's alright." She refrains from saying "It's going to be alright," because she can't guarantee that. She has no skill at divination, none of the inexplicable intuition that Rebecca possesses and swears she inherited from her Aeurgan grandmother. She's no good at predicting the future, and so she doesn't bother trying, but after saying it the second time, she thinks that she's right. It is alright, at least for now. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title refers to the flower anemone, not the sea creature, although you better believe I tried to figure out some weird symbolism that could work for both. According to the language of flowers, anemones represent the death of a loved one, the loss of hope, or the feeling of abandonment.
> 
> Alternate titles for this chapter include "why can spooky_bee only think of flashbacks and not actual plot" and "to what great lengths will spooky_bee go to to avoid writing action scenes this week." On that note, apologies to anyone who came into this fic expecting extensive mech fights. I realized pretty early on in this game that writing action scenes is not my forte, and so I just kind of...haven't. I'm in it for the character development, fam ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯


	15. An inevitable convergence

"Sloth was a failure," Envy explains blandly, examining their fingernails. "Always was." Envy spends a large portion of their time trying not to think about the aptitude of their name. Of course, Envy considered themselves to be perfect. What cause would they have to envy anybody, or anything? Especially  _Sloth,_ of all things. That brainless lug could not hold a candle to Envy in any single respect as far as they were concerned, but they couldn't stop the slight itch in the back of their mind, the want that was never satisfied, no matter what they did. They wondered what life would be like being a homunculus who actually looked like a homunculus, one not burdened with the weight of consciousness, just blindly trying to knock over the world, insatiably searching for human blood. Instead, Envy looks, for all intents and purposes, quite human, and can act like it with the best of them. Usually this seemed like a blessing, or at least as much of a blessing as something like them could get. But, with this blessing, Envy can consider all the ways in which life would be easier, less complicated, if they were just a mindless killing machine like Sloth or Gluttony or Lust or Greed. Instead they are stuck playing servant to Wrath, and it infuriates them. They're better than this. But they're a homunculus; what else would they be doing?

Wrath's face is placid, but his hands are white-knuckled and shaking as they sit intertwined on the table of the war room. "That is no excuse. You're smarter than he was, although not by much. You should have been able to coordinate the sortie in such a way as to get rid of Mustang. That was your job, and  _you_ failed."

"Technically, wasn't that  _your_ job? After all, you are the head of this whole operation,  _General Bradley_ \--"

Almost before the final syllable of their sentence leaves their lips, Envy finds themselves pinned to the wall by a sword. It knocks the wind out of them, landing squarely in their gut, but even as it slices through their abdomen, Envy can feel the wound beginning to close. The twin swords that Wrath always carries at his sides are interpreted by most to be a relic of Amestrian military decorum, an empty symbol of power. But in reality, Wrath's reflexes are just as sharp as his blades, and he managed to throw the sword so fast that Envy didn't have time to react, and so they are pinned.

They cough up a small bit of blood. "God, Wrath, can you just chill for a second?"

"We're running out of chances," Wrath says calmly.

"There's still Greed," Envy responds.

"There's still you, if it comes to that." Wrath's one human eye locks on Envy's. "After all, you've shown yourself to be decent at killing. I'm sure you could figure out a way to get rid of Mustang easily enough."

Envy snickers, even as blood dribbles out the corner of their mouth. "Yeah, I could change into that uppity blonde he's so hung up on and he'd never see it coming." Envy laughs as their features melt into Captain Hawkeye's. "Wouldn't that just be hilarious?" Envy asks through Hawkeye's honeyed alto. "I killed Hughes while looking like his wife, and I could kill Mustang while looking like his fantasy. Who says you have to be human to understand justice?"

"Don't get ahead of yourself," Wrath cautions. "That would be a last resort."

"Now, see, I would've thought that Pride would've been the _true_ last resort."

Wrath's brow pinches. "Leave Pride out of this."

Envy sighs, feeling the way air billows out of Hawkeye's chest. "You know, I'm so grateful that I'm not half-human. Having all those squishy emotions inside of you sounds exhausting."

There is a knock at the door. "Now who could that be?" Envy asks.

"Your doppelgänger," Wrath explains. "I have something I need to discuss with her, so if you would kindly un-skewer yourself and go get the door, I would appreciate it." And then, as if there were still any question as to who is in charge here, he adds "Intern."

Envy sneers, gripping at the hilt of the sword and pulling it out of Hawkeye's abdomen with a wince, before allowing Hawkeye's features to melt back into their own. "Take your sword, _General_." Envy tosses it across the room and Wrath catches it gracefully by the hilt, returning it to its scabbard with practiced efficiency.

Envy opens the door and regards Captain Hawkeye coolly. There is still a deep maroon bruise over her left eye, but it is mostly hidden by her bangs, a coincidence that Envy guesses is intentional. Aside from that, though, you would never guess that she had been hospitalized.

"Captain," Envy greets lazily.

"Hello, Invidia. The General wanted to see me."

"That he did," Envy says with a yawn. "Well, I've got plenty of intern stuff to do. You know, getting coffee, filing paperwork, etc., etc." They slip out the door, brushing past Hawkeye and leaving her looking slightly confused.

"Come in, Captain," Wrath says from the table.

Hawkeye salutes him. "Yes, sir." She always amazes him with her decorum. Even Colonel Armstrong, who is arguably the best soldier that they have, has a little bit of fight in her. Armstrong's loyalty is fierce, but she has a slight taste for insubordination if she feels that she's in the right. Hawkeye, however, has a spine straight as a rapier, and her salute always falls at a crisp forty-five degree angle. She's the perfect soldier; a bit soft in the middle, yes, but an indefatigable resource. "You called for me, sir?"

"At ease, Captain." She lowers her arm, but with the same sharpness of motion that she used to salute. "And yes, I did. I have an errand for you to run."

"And what is that, sir?"

Wrath puts on his Bradley smile, the one that accentuates the lines around his mouth and eyes and makes him look affable, paternal, the one that puts female news anchors at ease and doesn't threaten foreign dignitaries. "I'd like you to pick up Selim from school and bring him here."

Hawkeye is not easily surprised. If Wrath didn't know that was her birth name, didn't remember her parents, he would think that her name was a joke, a play on how sharp her eyes are. But he can't deny how aptly named she is. She doesn't miss much, and so it takes a lot to catch her off guard. Homunculus attacks, rogue Alchemists, ruin and death, all of these tend not to shake her, but Wrath takes a small bit of pleasure at the fact that this most banal of requests seems to have confused her.

"Excuse me, sir?"

He chuckles. "You heard me correctly, Captain; I wish for you to pick Selim up at school and bring him here. It's his birthday on Sunday, you see, and he's been begging to see a real live Alchemist for years. Today we're running a test on the Flame Alchemist, and I thought I'd let him come and watch."

"Um." Riza Hawkeye is a woman of few words, but the few words she utters always are thought out, have a clear purpose. She's not one given to verbal tics like "um." "Pardon my asking, sir, but...why? The work we do is dangerous, and Selim is still quite young. Don't you think it might be best to bring him on another day? One where we're not actively testing the Alchemists, perhaps?"

"Selim isn't that young, actually," Wrath says. "He's a bit small for his age, but he is actually about to turn ten."

The Captain grits her teeth. She's a smart woman, and she obviously knows the direction he is going to take his rhetoric before he follows through on it. He doesn't need to uncover his other eye to see that underneath her cold exterior lies a fierce kind of protectiveness over the Elrics. She would do anything to avoid jeopardizing their situation, and that includes doing something she thinks is a bad idea. Humans really are too simple.

He likes watching her thought scramble like jackrabbits behind her eyes, likes keeping her on her toes, and so decides, instead, to not bring up the Elrics after all.

"Morale is a funny thing, Captain Hawkeye." He can see the muscles in her face at once relax at realizing that he isn't going to use the Elrics against her, and then re-tense when she realizes that she no longer knows what he's going to say. He gets a kind of delight out of this game. "And, as you may have noticed, morale has been rather low around here."

"I noticed," she says, and he can see images of Maes Hughes's tombstone flashing through her mind, of Elric and Mustang in the hospital, of a ghostly red emergency-lit elevator. She knows all too well that the atmosphere at Central HQ has been tense.

"And it hasn't just been here. The faith in what we're doing has been slipping throughout Amestris. Isn't it funny how the citizens of this country don't trust the organization that is keeping them safe?" He gives a dry little chuckle, but Hawkeye remains silent. "But children are our future, quite literally. And we are trying to guarantee that there will still be a future for them to have, so what better way of doing that than having the General of the State Alchemist Program's son tell all his little school friends about how wonderful the work we're doing is?" It's so easy to lie. He thinks that the human side of him should feel some guilt about lying to this woman, who clearly has put so much of her life and soul and blood into what they're doing while having no idea what she is actually working to accomplish, but he doesn't. Wrath realizes that humans often lie to accomplish what they believe to be right, and finds that guilt is a particularly bothersome emotion, and so he decides not to waste his time feeling it. "And besides," Wrath says, letting his eye close in a way that softens his smile and keeps Hawkeye from seeing the sheer joy he feels at fooling her. "He's been just  _dying_ to meet Edward."

* * *

Riza can't remember her family having money very clearly. It all started to drain out of their lives after she and her father returned from the _Flamel_ and her father refused to do research for the military anymore, instead opting to continue his work, but with seemingly no outlet. He hand-wrote all his papers, and his office was full of them, surely posing a fire hazard as the stacks grew and grew, but the Hawkeye house never burned down. She thinks that would've been appropriate, since he had created the first design of the Flame Alchemist, but she thinks there probably wasn't enough energy left in their house for it to burn down. Their home was just as exhausted as they were, and combusting would've been too much work.

The closest she has to those memories are her memories of spending summers with her mother's parents in East City, but even those started to fade once they realized that, aside from her looks, Riza didn't have much in common with her mother, or with the little girl who used to hold her grandmother's hand while walking through art galleries, or who would beg her grandfather to tell her stories about her mother when she was young. For a time, she was the darling of Eastern Headquarters, every military man and woman doting on her, letting her accompany them to the shooting ranges. Her childhood, while unorthodox, was as happy as one could reasonably hope for.

But, the existence of her grandparents and of the Hawkeye house aside, her family struggled with money for the rest of her father's life. Other than his research, Berthold Hawkeye left her no inheritance to speak of, and so apart from her own hard work and Chris Mustang's generosity, she lived in constant fear of poverty. Because of this, flagrant displays of wealth made her uncomfortable, and she feels a queasy sort of inadequacy as she drives up the long, oak-lined driveway of Langley's School for Boys, the best (and most expensive) private school in the city, and the school to which General Bradley sent his son, Selim.

Because of the trees, all that can be seen of Langley's from the road is the central spire of a clock tower, but as you approach it you can begin to make out a rather palatial-looking gothic building, built in the mid-nineteenth century. Central is an odd city, as it has continued to expand despite having nowhere to expand to. The closer you get to the central spoke of the city, the older the buildings tend to be, all grey stone and pointed arches, but the further you get to the suburbs that lie outside the city limits, you begin to see more contemporary architecture. That being said though, at any given place you may have a nineteenth century masterpiece directly beside a grocery store or a shopping mall. Central is an odd cohabitation of the ultra-modern and the antiquated, constantly rubbing against each other and fighting for which is more truly authentic. Langley's is very much part of the old guard, still situated in the heart of the city, but sequestered enough due to some clever urban planning to have the feel of a country boarding school. 

Of course, this idyllic setup was an entirely fabricated illusion. The school's front door was a five minute walk from a Tunnel station, so that these wealthy children (whose families didn't have drivers and chauffeurs, of course) could walk quickly and safely to school each morning. It only felt like it was in the middle of the countryside. After all, these children were in the city for a reason. Many of them, since Central is the capital city of Amestris, are the children of politicians or military high-ups, and it is one such of those children that Riza is there to acquire.

After the sortie with Sloth, the air conditioning had come back on in full force, and now Central HQ was frigid. Whether this was due to the fact that the air conditioner was somehow stronger now after being reassembled or they just weren't used to it anymore was up for debate, but Riza had opted to wear a smart jacket that day, and she's glad she did, because it lends her an air of authority and professionalism that she isn't sure she has, but that she needs at the moment. She thinks, as she walks through the front doors (large, heavy, probably hand-carved mahogany pieces covered in old-school regalia of lions and unicorns and swords), that this should probably be the intern's job, but then she thinks of Invidia, with their long hair, proclivity for tank tops, and tendency to disrespect and thinks that the General probably knew exactly what he was doing when he appointed her for this task. This may technically be below her rank, and she's never been the warmest or most welcoming woman, but in order to pick up the General's child from school you'd need to be very professional, and if Riza Hawkeye is anything, she is that.

The woman behind the front desk is typing something furiously into her computer and doesn't bother to look up when Riza opens the door. "How may I help you?"

"Hello, I'm Captain Riza Hawkeye, from the State Alchemist Program. I was sent by General King Bradley to pick up his son, Selim."

The woman stops typing, looking up at Riza for the first time. Riza thinks that she looks slightly nervous, which makes sense. She would be nervous too if she worked at a school where so many important people's children attended.

"I'm going to need to see your military identification, if you please."

Riza complies, pulling her ID badge out of her jacket pocket. She always finds it slightly funny to look at now, because she looks so different. When the photo for her ID was taken, she had been fresh out of Central U. Her hair was still short, not even covering her ears, and her face was a little fuller than it is now. Her cheekbones have sharpened over the last few years, and she finds that she looks older than her age now. Or maybe she just feels that way in comparison to Mustang. Baby face aside, he has always been better at being young than her, and people who don't know any better often assume that she is the older of the two.

That being said, the transformation from Recent College Graduate Riza Hawkeye to Captain Riza Hawkeye isn't that startling. She's grown out her hair, but she hasn't dyed it or gotten glasses or piercings or anything like that. Most of the changes over the last few years have been internal, and you certainly wouldn't be able to tell that from her military ID photo.

The woman hands Riza back her ID and says "Yes, the General informed us that you would be coming. If you will just follow me, then we'll go and claim Selim. I'm sure he's been eagerly awaiting your arrival."

Riza understands that the children at this school probably have more social importance than she'll ever have, but she thinks that there is something oddly formal, almost solemn, about the way this woman talks about a nine-year-old boy.

She follows the woman through pristinely-polished hallways, passing doors through whose windows she can see row after row of identically-uniformed boys, most of whom seem to be just as golden-eyed and flaxen-haired as her. The whole setting is slightly eerie. She knows that she was an unusually serious child, but the complete and utter lack of normal childish noise and merriment strikes her as strange. Her boots and the woman's kitten heels echo ominously through the building, bouncing off of marble and wood and other things that Riza will never be able to afford, as if announcing their presence to everyone before they actually arrive. All the children are so well-behaved, sitting quietly in their rows and listening attentively to their teachers. She thinks that Ed and Al would probably fit in, at least phenotypically, with these boys, but the thought of either of them wearing Langley's blazer-sporting uniforms and sitting with their hands folded in their laps like this is so unbelievably incongruous that she emits a small chuckle that the woman appears not to have heard.

The woman guides her up a set of marble stairs and then down a hallway to a door that looks no different than any of the others and raps gently on the wood with a set of pale knuckles before opening it and stepping inside.

The air in the room is still and quiet, with even the teacher having been hushed by the woman's intrusion. Riza can spot Selim immediately. For such a small boy, he cuts a striking figure amidst his traditionally Amestrian-looking classmates with his black hair and large, lavender eyes. He looks a bit like the General--the same dark hair, at least--which confirms what she's heard that he was somehow related to him, despite him being adopted, but the rest of his features look like someone she knows, but she can't place her finger on who.

"Sorry for the interruption," says the woman. "But this is Captain Riza Hawkeye, from the State Alchemist Program. She has been sent by General Bradley to pick up Selim."

Upon hearing his name, Selim smiles widely. The rest of the boys look between him and Riza, faces not entirely puzzled but not entirely understanding either. She wonders just how much they know about Selim and his family. She knows that children gossip, but so much of what they do is considered to be (at least ideally) top secret. She knows that, in the years since she was in school herself, knowledge of the Greed attack on the A.M.S.  _Flamel_ and some information about the State Alchemist Program and what they do has been included in history curricula. She tries not to think of this too much, the way she is being directly involved in history, of how every decision she makes could be recorded in a textbook at some later date. But, she supposes, this makes sense; it's better to make history than to stand by and allow for history to end altogether.

Selim looks up hopefully at his teacher, who nods in his direction. "You are free to go, Selim. Be sure to get the homework from someone else in the class."

"Yes, ma'am," Selim says, getting up hurriedly from his seat and shoving her books haphazardly into his school bag. He trots happily over to where Riza and the woman from the front desk are standing, the same bounce in his step that most kids would have on hearing that they're going to get out of school early.

"Hi, Captain Hawkeye!" he says brightly.

"Hello, Selim." She tries to smile as warmly as she can, but something isn't sitting right with her, and she doesn't know what it is. Riza finds herself surprised by his behavior. She has met Selim a couple of times before, but that had been a year or two before, and he had always been toted around by his parents. She's never found herself alone with or in charge of the boy. She isn't sure what she expected, honestly; perhaps a little more gravitas. After all, he is the son of General Bradley. But he seems no different than a normal boy his age. He wants to get out of school early and look at giant robots. He has friends who he can get homework from. Parentage notwithstanding, he probably is having a much more normal childhood than she ever did. She gnaws gently on the inside of her lip. It's unseemly to be jealous of a child.

Back at the front desk, Riza has to sign a slip stating that Selim has indeed left with her, and hands over her military ID to be photocopied for the records. All the way down from his classroom, Selim had been chattering blithely about how glad he was to be pulled out of school because this teacher, Mrs. Something-or-other, was so  _boring._ But once they were out of the school, Riza found that she couldn't think of anything to talk to the boy about. They had nothing in common, although she guesses that she doesn't have much in common with most people, but more than this just being an errand, this is an errand for  _the General_. Pedestrian or not, how she performs on this task will reflect back on her as a person and as a soldier in a position of power. Children are supposed to be excellent judges of character, aren't they? Perhaps he wants to use Selim to gauge her.

"Did you hear me, Captain?"

Riza starts. She has the tendency to zone out when staring at the road. Driving requires just enough concentration to allow her to turn her mind away from distraction and focus on things, but occasionally this leads to her ending up in a kind of trance and tuning out the world.

"Sorry, Selim, I was concentrating on the road. What were you saying?"

"I was saying that I can't wait to see the Alchemists! They're so cool! Will I get to see the Fullmetal Alchemist? I heard the pilot is really young, like me."

"Maybe. We're actually running a test on the Flame Alchemist today, which is what you'll be observing."

Selim pouts. "That's not nearly as cool. I've met  _that_ pilot. He's  _old_."

Riza laughs. "I think he'd die if he heard you say that."

"I wanna meet the  _Fullmetal_ Alchemist's pilot."

"You should be able to meet him."

"Good! I want to talk to him about being a pilot. Maybe I can be one too when I grow up!"

She almost swerves off the road, and so she grips the steering wheel so hard her hands begin to shake. She knows that she shouldn't be allowed to feel the kind of visceral fear that she feels when he says that. After all, wasn't she the one who recruited Edward Elric, the one who went to the smoldering remains of Resembool and looked at the little boy missing an arm and a leg and thought that he should have to carry the burden of humanity's survival? But she's seen the way that burden sits on Ed's shoulders. She knows that he has trouble sleeping, has trouble being the same bright boy he was before he ever got into an Alchemist for the first time. She knows consciously that Alchemists run on electricity, just like any other machine, but she sometimes thinks when she sees Ed constantly napping around their apartment, or the way Mustang will just stare into space for whole minutes at a time, that perhaps they're actually draining something from the people who pilot them. They used to be so much sharper than they are now, so much brighter.

But she can't say that, obviously. Selim isn't even ten yet, and this is just as much a PR move as it is an innocent field trip for the General's son. She's a captain; she can't just tell a child about the doubts she has about what they do. No one needs to know how many doubts she has.

"Maybe," she says instead, and stares ahead, down the road, where their hopes and dreams and fears lie.

* * *

On a scale of one to "There is a honunculus attacking the city," "The General is bringing his son to HQ" ranks in at a solid seven.

Everyone at HQ knows Mrs. Bradley. She's stopped by on special occasions fairly frequently, and seems like the picture of a perfect army wife, although a bit homely. She's a sweet woman, and always brings them baked goods and smiles. The only complaint any of them has is that she's a bit old-fashioned, which is to be expected. She comes from money, born and bred in Central with all that implies, and so her values are a bit dated. They all like her, but Rebecca feels that sometimes when Mrs. Bradley looks at her, she's thinking that she'd be better suited for something a little less serious.

(Five years ago, Rebecca would've agreed with her. She joined up with the Program because she'd always had a head for science and everyone in her family was military, so it made sense. She hoped to be able to pick up some well-to-do military man, get hitched, settle down, and never have to see the business end of an Alchemist ever again. But the longer she worked there, and the more her casual flings yielded nothing more than fun one-night-stands, the more she realized that she might actually enjoy her job. And more than just that, she was  _good_ at it, better than many of her male counterparts. Sure, one day she would like to get out of Central HQ, maybe move down South near the Aerugan border where her grandparents are, but for now she finds that she's actually pretty happy, all things considered.)

With Selim, however, this was a different matter entirely. 

Havoc is nervously chain smoking at his desk, as if he can stockpile enough nicotine in his system to survive not being able to smoke while Selim is there (the General has a strict policy of no one smoking while his son is at HQ). Rebecca had been sitting next to him, chatting aimlessly until Olivier had decided to grace them all with this most exciting of news. Even though Rebecca and Havoc's hookup the night of Mustang's birthday had ended up going nowhere (poor guy; Rebecca can't help but feel a little bad for him since this is a continuous pattern in his life), she still likes the poor bastard. Unlike  _some_ people (namely Olivier and Riza, who are, for some reason, her best friends) he actually knows how to carry on a casual conversation that doesn't veer down the dark and spooky road of their cosmic insignificance or possible imminent mortality.

"Dammit, _really_?" Rebecca moans. "Today of all days?"

"Today of all days especially," Olivier explains. "We need some good PR."

"Shouldn't that be the intern's job?" Havoc asks. 

"The intern is working on other things."

"Like what? Making more iced tea?" Havoc grumbles. No one is particularly fond of the intern; they're aggressive and impolite and have a nasal, grating voice that begins to wear after a while. And Olivier makes no secret when she dislikes someone; her distaste for Mustang is so hilariously telegraphed that it's become something of a running joke. Her feelings toward the intern seem much more ambivalent, however. Invidia does a lot that, if it were anyone else, would drive her up a wall, but sometimes it seems as if the intern's appointment--direct from the General--keeps her on a tighter leash than it normally would to openly critique their behavior. And so Olivier glares at Havoc, as she so often does, but there's a little less spite in it than there normally is. It must be difficult, Rebecca thinks, to muster up the kind of energy required to be Olivier Armstrong. She's having enough trouble being Rebecca Catalina, and that seems much less stressful. They're all a little drained after the sortie with Sloth, truthfully, and even Olivier isn't strong enough to deny that.

"Sorry," Havoc says, puffing out smoke. "I still haven't figured out why we have an intern in the first place, honestly. What do they even  _do_?"

No one is entirely sure, and so no one offers Havoc an answer. Much like God, there is no point in wondering about the intentions of General Bradley.

"Captain Hawkeye is on her way here with him now as we speak," Olivier explains, swiftly ignoring Havoc's questions.

"How long until she gets here?" Rebecca asks.

"Langley's is about twenty minutes away, give or take some change because of traffic."

Rebecca groans, dropping her forehead to the cool surface of Havoc's desk. She wishes she smoked. She thinks a nice nicotine-buzz could help settle her nerves and curb her disappointment at having to deal with this extra burden today, but she can't stand it. She had had asthma as a kid, and she still caught bronchitis, steady as clockwork, every winter. Her lungs are far too fragile to smoke herself, and so she tries to absorb some nicotine through osmosis by sitting next to Havoc. "This is the  _worst_ ," she mumbles in the desk, and Havoc pats her head affectionately, if a bit roughly, like a child petting a large dog. (This makes her bristle a bit; because of her massively curly black hair, she had earned the ignominious nickname "Poodle" as a child, and the comparison still makes her shudder a bit in childhood embarrassment, but she knows that Havoc almost certainly isn't intending that. The man may be a complete idiot in all things but computers, but he's also a sweetheart.)

"Take those twenty minutes to compose yourselves," Olivier advises. 

"I'm gonna need it," Rebecca grumbles.

Ed and Mustang had already been informed of the news, and watched from the other side of the observation deck as Rebecca and Havoc complained.

"Why is everyone freaking out so much about this?" Ed asks.

"Yeah, I forgot; you don't know," Mustang says. Sometimes it's easy to forget just how comparatively short Ed's stay at the Program has been compared to everyone else. He doesn't quite know the contours of their situation yet. "You've met the General, I assume."

"Yeah, I have." 

The General seemed like a nice enough guy: stern, judicious, but paternal. Still, there was something about him that Ed couldn't place that made him wary. Perhaps it was just the same generalized distrust he had of most people in positions of power, but there was something else, something...unnatural. Uncanny. Like staring at a picture, unable to tell whether it was a drawing or a photograph.

"You haven't seen him like this," Mustang says. "He's different when his son is involved. It'll give you an idea of what he must seem like to all those foreign armies."

"How do you mean?"

"I'm not sure if you've noticed," Mustang says, the beginnings of a joke drying out his tone. "But some of our comrades are not particularly family-friendly, myself included."

"Yeah, no shit," Ed says, and Mustang gestures to him with a hand that belies none of the horrible violence that has been done with it, aristocratic fingers built out of fragile-looking bones, as if to say "You see my point."

"The General is fairly content to let us do as we please most of the time; he has bigger things to deal with than policing us. But when Selim is here, we're all getting shown off, and so he's a little less lenient than he usually is. You see Catalina over there?" Mustang gestures with a coltish toss of his dark head and Ed looks to where Rebecca is hanging her head and Havoc is petting it rather awkwardly. "She's got a mouth like a sailor, and she accidentally cursed around Selim once and the General scolded her for a solid hour."

"Well, this'll be fun," Ed says grimly.

"I wouldn't worry too much, honestly," Mustang assures. "After all, Selim is coming here to see me." The chortle he releases sounds almost nervous, but Ed doesn't think he's ever seen Mustang nervous. He doesn't like the idea.

* * *

Riza has been witness to several Selim visits, but never on this side of things. She had been a part of the hurried clean-up, had even directed it, but she had never been the one delivering the boy herself. She wonders why Mrs. Bradley isn't there, but knows better than to ask.

General Bradley and Olivier greet them at the above-ground entrance to Central HQ, the General smiling and Olivier looking her usual icy self. Selim has been talking excitedly since before they left Langley's and hasn't stopped since, only beginning again with renewed vigor upon seeing his father, Colonel Armstrong, and the entrance to Central HQ.

"Will I get to ride down the elevator?" Selim asks excitedly.  

"It's not technically an elevator, because it doesn't go straight down," Riza corrects.

"That part's my favorite!" Selim chirps, ignoring her comment completely. 

"Hello, Selim," the General says with a fatherly smile. "How was school?"

"Boring," Selim says, skipping over to meet his father. "But I got to ride in Captain Hawkeye's car, and she said that I might get to meet the pilot of the Fullmetal Alchemist!"

"Maybe," General Bradley says, reaching down to ruffle his son's hair. "Today we're running a test on the Flame Alchemist, so maybe Edward Elric would be so kind as to sit with you while we observe it."

Selim's smile is blinding, full of the effortless charm of simple childhood happiness. His world is small and filled with simple pieces of boredom and excitement.

"Thank you for getting him for me, Captain," the General says to her. She's normally not one who needs to fear the General's wrath on days when Selim visits, but this feels different somehow. Her hackles are raised and she isn't sure why, but she feels like she should be prepared to bolt at any moment. This is something that goes beyond nerves, beyond anxiety. This is something that is unsettling on the depth of her marrow.

But she doesn't have time to entertain these odd thoughts; they have a test to run. "Of course, sir. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go talk with the pilots."

Only as she walks away does she realize that her knees are shaking.

* * *

It takes an almost hilariously short time for Ed to decide that he really doesn't like the son of their illustrious General. 

Riza had led Selim up to the observation deck, separated by glass from the actual test floor, with him practically bouncing on the balls of his feet at the prospect of seeing an Alchemist in action. Ed can understand that, especially since the kid is so young, but he never felt that kind of wonder himself. As a child, he never saw the Alchemists as anything other than a menace. To a young Ed, the Alchemists were just as responsible for the death of his mother and the destruction of his home as Gluttony was. They should have worked better, faster, the Crimson Lotus Alchemist shouldn't have gone berserk, and when it did they should have handled it, but they didn't. Even being an Alchemist pilot himself, he still has a conflicted relationship with the machine that he operates. He knows, perhaps better than anybody, that as much capacity as they have for doing good, they have just as much capacity for destruction.

But Selim's enthusiasm isn't what rubs him the wrong way the most. What annoys him infinitely more is what happens after Riza introduces him.

"Selim, this is Edward Elric, pilot of the Fullmetal Alchemist."

And then, to Edward's complete and utter horror, Selim  _laughs_. "You're really funny, Captain Hawkeye!" he says in his nasally little-boy voice. "I know he's young, but there's no way he'd be so  _short_."

Ed knows that is morally wrong to slap a child, but at the moment he very, very much  _wants_ to.

"Nope, that's definitely me," Ed says through gritted teeth. "Edward Elric. Pilot of the Fullmetal Alchemist. Boy genius, darling of the State Alchemist Program, possessor of a great sense of style. And, for your information, I've actually grown recently--"

"Alright, Ed," Riza says, cutting him off. "He just wanted to meet you. It was all he talked about in the car, actually. Well," she says, dropping into a conspiratorial tone unusual for her. There's a small crinkle at the corner of her mouth that he thinks might be the embryo of a smile. "That and how old and boring Mustang is."

Honestly, being called short by a nine-year-old (who is significantly shorter than he is, after all, and so has no room to talk) is almost made up for by this revelation. 

"See, this kid knows what he's talking about!" Selim beams at that. "Mustang  _is_ boring, and he  _is_ old. Did you know that he has grey hair?"

"Ed, you probably shouldn't be making fun of Mustang right before he's going to be doing a test in the Alchemist."

"Why? It's not like he can hear me."

"Actually..." Riza taps at the lapel of her shirt, where a piece of plastic, only distinguishable from the buttons of her shirt by being a different color, is clipped. "He can."

Ed pales a little bit. "What?"

"Yeah, you better believe I heard you, Fullmetal," comes Mustang's voice over the loudspeaker. "I can't believe you're spreading lies about me to the General's son."

"How can I be doing that if I'm telling the truth?"

"Alright, children," Riza cautions, voice level. And then, to Ed: "Fuery has been working on this little thing for ages. He said that the old microphone was too bulky and made running tests up here complicated. Isn't that right, Fuery?" Riza looks over her shoulder where Fuery is running the communication programs on his computer. He looks up upon hearing his name, smiles bashfully, and then returns to his work.

The sound of the General's boots walking up behind her makes her spine straighten, like a sudden cold breeze. 

"Are you ready to begin the test, Captain?" he asks, voice warm and low, the kind of voice she imagines most fathers use to ask their children how their day at school was. She doesn't think her father's voice ever sounded like that, even before he got sick, even when her mother was alive.

"Yes, sir," she says. She angles her face down toward the small microphone on her lapel. "Did you hear that, Mustang?"

"I did," Mustang says over the loudspeaker, and even though she isn't facing the monitor that is broadcasting from inside the Flame Alchemist's entry plug, she can tell that he's grinning.

Even though their job is filled with pain and disappointment and fear, she can't help the thrill that leaps through her veins whenever an Alchemist is about to move, and she knows that he feels the same. It's an incomparable kind of power, and one that is just as intoxicating as it is terrifying. "Show time." She rolls her eyes. Even now, he always has to inject a little bit of drama into whatever it is that they're doing, even when it's wholly inappropriate. (Or slightly cringe-worthy. Mustang has a very vaudeville sense of drama, full of swishing coats and dashing military heroes saying lines that would've been quite debonair in the 1920's, and still would be a little bit stylish now with a dash of irony, but Mustang is entirely earnest in his aspirations, and while his lines may come off sounding somewhat overwrought, they come from the heart.)

"Alright, we'll begin the test now."

While they are, technically, a paramilitary organization, the State Alchemist Program is also heavily involved in scientific research. Everything they do, every innovation, blunder, or discovery, is recorded for future documentation. All of this raw data is sent back to a team of researchers specifically working on the study of Alchemists and homunculi at Central University. It was this team of researchers that Riza's father had worked with, before resigning after the incident on the  _Flamel_. Well, not these researchers in particular, aside from a few of the older members. While not all of this Alchemist research team went to the Drachman Sea on that trip, all those who did, aside from her father, had died. Berthold refused to work with a team that clearly didn't know what they were doing and would endanger the lives of their own personnel so readily, and so he quit, retiring to his home under the pretense of "being with his daughter" and "pursuing his own research in private." One of those things was certainly true, and the first may have been true as well, at first. But as his mind and his health started to fade, so did his concern for Riza, at least explicitly. She thinks (when she thinks about such things, which seems to be happening oftener and oftener as of late) that, even there at the end when he ignored her completely in favor of Mustang, that he still loved her. But underneath his icy façade, Berthold Hawkeye was a brokenhearted man, and he couldn't stand to constantly be reminded of his own loss.

She always thinks that there had to be more to it than that, but she isn't sure what that would be. Her father wasn't hugely preoccupied with questions of ethics or morals, and so even the research team's indiscriminate disposal of their researchers didn't seem like something that would've troubled her father if her mother hadn't been involved. There has to be something else. But even after all these years of nursing the memory of her father, she hasn't come to any more conclusions. Maybe Mustang has, but he hasn't brought it up. Normally, she would think that if he knew something, then he would've told her, but his recent switch to withholding information from her makes her think otherwise. But she knows, having seen his face when he confessed that he felt guilty when he looked at her, or when he flicked his eyes nervously to the door in her hospital room when he said that he had something to tell her, that he doesn't enjoy lying to her. This isn't a game he wants to be playing. She can sympathize.

All hands are on deck today to impress the General's son, although she doesn't think that's entirely necessary. Selim is only nine years old, and is the type of nine year old that is easily impressed by just about anything. (She was the other kind of nine-year-old, the kind impressed by nothing, or at least that's what her grandmother in East always said, drawling small tendrils of smoke from the silver-tipped cigarette holder she always smoked from so that she wouldn't get "nicotine fingers." She thinks that she's impressed by much, and always has been, but she's never been too good at broadcasting her emotions.) They even pulled Winry out of school for the day so that they could have an extra pair of hands in rigging the entry plug. After the incident with Sloth, with the power being cut and the Alchemists having to be rigged manually, they've started adding that into their practice routine, so that if it happens again (God forbid) they won't be caught so off-guard.

"Disperse the PSL," Riza commands, and is met by a brusque "Yes, ma'am" from Breda, behind her. She turns away from the glass of the observation deck to look at the monitor as Mustang's entry plug gradually fills with the viscous red liquid.

No one is entirely sure what "PSL" stands for. For whatever reason, despite the fact that they use it almost constantly and allow their pilots to fill their lungs with it, the actual meaning of that initialism are classified. Riza doesn't know, isn't allowed to know because her authorization doesn't extend that far, but also doesn't really care. All she knows is that it both looks and smells like blood, and although it never stains any of the pilots' faces or clothing, you can always smell it on them for hours afterward, even after showering, as if they just got finished butchering an animal, a tangy metallic smell that never ceases to unsettle Riza. She's sure that Armstrong, Elric, and Mustang must have gotten accustomed to it by now, but she never has, and doubts that she ever will.

But Mustang, unlike her, understands the Alchemists on some sort of ineffable, molecular level. And so even though Elric still flinches and flounders as he has to allow the PSL into his lungs, Mustang sucks it down like air, not even wincing.

The moment when the Alchemist comes alive, goes from being a hulking piece of metal to something that actually  _lives_ , is always the most impressive part to Riza. It's like they're watching real magic, real alchemy, even though she knows that, consciously, there is no part of what she's seeing that can't be explained through science. But Mustang was always the scientist between the two of them, and so she indulges herself in a bit of childish wonder, just for a moment, before asking "How are you feeling?"

"Peachy keen," he jokes.

"Excellent," Riza says, knowing that the best way to tell Mustang that his sense of humor is awful (which it is) is to avoid acknowledging altogether, like a playground bully. But, much like a playground bully, that never ends up working, and he continues making his terrible jokes whether anyone laughs at them or not.

The purpose of their test is half for show and half for legitimate observation: they wanted to show something flashy to Selim, and there is very little that's exciting to watch about sync rate tests. But, with the recent scare of the power outage, the issue of how long the Alchemists could run when not attached to their umbilical cables became a very serious issue. Prior to the sortie with Sloth, the battery of an Alchemist could only run for between one minute and five minutes depending on the level of energy expenditure, which, for the level of technology they have access to, is not hugely impressive. And so the engineers have been working since then to improve that battery life should something similar happen, or if the Alchemists should need to disconnect from their umbilical cables in the field. While not the most seasoned pilot they have (Armstrong has held that title long before Mustang, Ed, or even Kimblee showed up), Mustang has a long history of having the most stable sync rates in the Program, and so even if something in the test were to go south, Mustang should still be able to pilot effectively. 

"Could you perform some basic movements?" Riza asks.

"Of course," Mustang responds, and raises and lowers both of the Alchemists' arms.

"Good. Are you ready to release the umbilical cable?"

"Have been since birth."

Even Riza has to let out a small, breathy chuckle at that. While usually his sense of humor is pretty appalling, he is occasionally responsible for some clever turns of phrase. "Alright, release the cord." She signals to Fuery, who in turn sends a short message to the engineers below, severing the cable attaching the Alchemist to a power supply with a hiss and a burst of steam.

"Still feeling normal?" Riza asks.

"I feel--" Mustang begins, but is interrupted by a crackle over the communication lines that obscures his next word.

"Mustang?" Riza asks, beating off panic like a needy dog. It was probably just the new communication network; new technology always has bugs that need to be fixed, kinks that need to be ironed out. But now is  _not_ the time for that.

"Captain?" Havoc asks. "You may wanna look at the screen."

She tucks her bottom lip between her teeth to keep from cursing and turns around. For a moment she isn't sure what Havoc means, because she sees nothing unusual on the screen, but then she realizes:  _that_ is the unusual part. There's nothing on the screen at all. 

"Fuery, what happened?" 

Fuery's mouth opens, but no words leave his lips. "I...I have no idea, honestly. The programs are still running, but it's like...it's like there's something on the other end blocking our signal."

"How is that possible?" Riza asks. "The only thing on the other side is the Alchemist."

"I...I don't know, Captain."

"We might have bigger problems at the moment, Captain," Havoc says. 

She turns back around and sees the Alchemist walking. No, more like stalking, moving in small, heavy steps toward them.

"Father, what's going on?" Selim asks.

"Nothing, son, it's all going to be fine," the General assures his son, but Riza can hear the lie in it. When will it be possible for them to use these machines rather than the other way around? When will they understand them enough not to be constantly bamboozled into believing that they have a semblance of control over them?

Turning away from the General, she turns back to see the Flame Alchemist standing a mere handful of feet away from the glass, peering intently at all of them sitting inside, as if they were goldfish in a fish tank.

"Mustang?" she tries, voice tentative. "Mustang, can you hear me?" The Alchemist doesn't move, just continues to stare, unblinking, at them.

"Riza?" Ed prods behind her. "What's going on with Mustang?"

"I'm not sure, Ed. But he's in there, so we don't need to worry."

"But, Riza..." Ed murmurs. "Didn't a pilot die in his Alchemist? He got separated into all of his component elements, like he dissolved in the PSL."

She grits her teeth. "That's not happening, Ed, there's just an issue with the comm system, that's all."

She hears the crisp click of Selim's school loafers connecting with the floor. He walks up to the glass, looking out at the Alchemist standing before them with awe. "This is so cool," he says. "They're so much bigger than you'd think they'd be from the pictures."

And then, as if the Alchemist had simply been waiting for something, its massive hand reaches out and punches the glass.

The glass used for the observation deck window had been specifically designed to be scratch- and break-resistant, precisely for incidents just as this. Well, no, not  _just_ like this. But in the course of experimentation, occasionally things go haywire and something ends up connecting with the glass. An Alchemist actually reaching out to strike the glass, particularly with people clearly inside, was unheard of.

"Selim!" the General calls, rushing to pull his son away from the glass, but not quick enough for the Alchemist to not get another punch in. The glass shouldn't even scratch, but every strike from the Alchemist sends a new web of cracks spinning out onto the window. With enough punches, the window will break, and then what will become of them?

With Selim out of sight though, the Alchemist stops what it was doing, returning to staring, before turning on its massive heels and walking over to a wall, bracing itself with both hands, and proceeding to slam its head against the wall.

"Mustang!" Riza shrieks, but it's for naught. She knows that he can't hear her, or possibly anything at all. She has no way of knowing what's happening inside the entry plug. Images of the puddle of powders and liquids that used to be Solf J. Kimblee flash through her mind.

"Eject the entry plug!" the General commands. "If it keeps doing this, the Alchemist will be ruined and we'll need to almost completely rebuild it."

"General, we can't."

The General's single exposed eye narrows. "What was that,  _Captain_?" He crunches down on her title, biting through it like a particularly fresh apple.

"I..." This is the first time she's ever deliberately disobeyed orders, and her contrasting urges to both respect the General's authority and protect Mustang are battling within her chest. "If we do that he could die. In the Alchemist he's still relatively safe, but if we eject the entry plug, it will have to fall all the way to the floor of the test room, and the entry plugs aren't hugely sturdy.

"I don't care, Captain," the General says calmly. "I didn't ask about the relative safety of entry plugs. I just told you to authorize the ejection." She finds it slightly amazing how he can be so callous while holding onto his son, and that his son doesn't seem particularly bothered by his father's casual cruelty.

"But, sir, the Alchemist will eventually run out of battery--"

"Yes, and by that point there won't be much of an Alchemist left for Mustang to pilot."

"Sir--"

The General turns to Havoc. "I have the clearance. Authorize the ejection."

She turns to Havoc, pleading with her eyes for him to do the one thing they were told never to do: disobey their General. Mustang is their friend, his as well as hers, and she knows that ejecting the entry plug would pain him just as much as it would pain her, but there's nothing he can do, and she knows that. "Yes, sir," he says quietly, and inputs a quick series of codes into his computer.

Riza barely has time to think before she turns and runs. She can vaguely register the General shouting at her and telling her to stop, but she can't. She had seen the initial arc of the entry plug as it was shot from the top of the Alchemist's spine, and she knows that she could be witnessing her best friend's death, and it sends a panic through her like nothing else she's ever felt, not when they've been fighting homunculi or when they were in Ishval. This is a fear so pure and refined that it feels like someone has shot ice-cold vodka through her veins, burning and freezing at the same time.

She thinks as she runs about the possibilities. Mustang is either alive or he's not. If he's alive, he could be seriously injured, possibly permanently, from the fall, and then they'd be out a pilot. That would wreck him, being without a purpose, but he'd still be there. If he died...

Riza has spent so much of her life now, almost half of it in fact, following him, protecting him, leading him. He was the first person to ever really take a vested interest in her, and he still does, even after all these years. Sometimes he looks at her like he used to look at math problems, like she was something elegant and complicated, and she needs that, because most days she feels plain and simplistic. He is so singularly responsible for helping her be the woman she has become, that she isn't sure if she could sustain that with him gone. The black tide of fear is rising from her ankles to her calves, and she knows that if he's not alive, she'll drown in it.

She punches in the pass-code to get into the test floor with so much force that it hurts the tips of her fingers, and she bounces on her feet because the doors aren't opening fast enough. Her heart is pounding frantically against her ribs, like someone trying to beat down a door, and when she finally manages to run onto the test floor she sees the entry plug lying on the ground, steaming and slightly dented.

She feels an unusual pricking at the back of her eyes, a strange tightness like her throat closing up. Only as she kneels on the ground beside the entry plug does she realize that she's crying.

Entry plugs are usually opened and closed mechanically, but in times of emergency, such as this one, they can be opened manually using a latch on the side. She grips onto it, immediately feeling it begin to sear at the flesh of her hands due to the heat, but she doesn't care. She has to get him out, she has no choice, and if that costs her her hands, then so be it.

Eventually, after almost a full minute of struggling, she opens the door of the entry plug. 

His eyes are closed, almost like he's sleeping, but other than that, he seems fine, nothing broken or bleeding. Upon the light flooding the entry plug, Mustang's eyes flutter open, and he looks up at Riza through his lashes. Upon seeing those eyes, the ones she thought would never open again, she lets out what she intends to be a breath, but ends up leaving her chest as a raw, strangled sob.

"Hey," he says, voice sleep-rough. With some effort, he manages to sit up. He looks at her face, at the red eyes and the wet cheeks, and reaches up, gently wiping the tears from her eye with a knuckle. "Are you crying over me, Riza? I'm not worth it, I promise." 

All of a sudden, it is like something in her mind falls into place, like it had just been waiting for the right moment to spring on her: She's in love with him. Upon realizing this fact, it seems hilarious to her that she could have ever thought otherwise. She had managed to convince herself that the things she felt for him when he still lived with her father was just childish infatuation, but she knows, looking down at him smiling wryly at her, that if he had never shown up, she would probably have ended up like her father, just a shade, too beaten down by grief to really live. But he rolled into her life like a summer storm that never truly dissipated, and finally her eyes are catching up with her heart, because she can't stop crying.

She hasn't cried in so long, and she forgot how easy it is to let yourself crumble, how satisfying it is to give in to your own fear and sadness and pain. He doesn't try to soothe her, which is something that she both appreciates and will never understand. He feels so freely, and understands people in a way she never will. And so he simply embraces her, reassuring her that he's still here. Still alive. She can feel his chest rising and falling with every breath, can feel the vital processes that haven't been stopped, and won't be stopped any time soon if there's anything she can say about it. In the elevator, when they had said they would die for each other, something else had been implied. They would also die without each other, or at least she knows that she would.

He holds her and he smells like PSL and sweat and his shampoo, but he feels like home. He is a piece of her heart, somehow taken shape outside of her own body. As the last of her sobs shakes itself out of her lungs, she hides her face in the crook of his neck and inhales and thinks:  _I'm doomed._

* * *

Wrath looks down at the scene from behind the glass. It's almost tender, in a way. That's why it has to be destroyed. Tender things are dangerous.

"Do you see that?" Wrath whispers into Pride's ear. Pride is a better actor than he is, but he's also had thousands of years more practice. It must be frustrating, to be a child for all eternity, but Wrath concedes that it has its advantages.

"Yes, I did," Pride responds.

"Then you know what we have to do."

"I do."

Love is a weapon best left concealed. In this case, it is just as easy to drive a knife into your own heart as it is to drive it through somebody else's.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, with the last chapter of this, this fic broke 100,000 words, which means that 1) This is up there for Longest Thing I Have Ever Written, and 2) I think this is a good time to thank everybody for their support and feedback. This fic has gotten wildly out of control and has been, at certain points, very hard to write, and so all of your kudos, comments, and bookmarks mean the world to me. I hope you keep following this wild ride to the end.
> 
> Chapter title is from something one of my literature professors said while talking about Charles Dickens's "Great Expectations": "Two characters are set up on opposite ends of a story, but inevitably have to collide, cracking the veneers of fantasy under which they are living, forcing them to be more honest with each other and themselves."
> 
> Also god this fic should be titled "Our embalmed sobs, our desolate crying." Maybe one day I'll write a chapter where no one cries. Probably not the next one, but sometime in the future. Maybe.


	16. Mise en abyme III

Or,

"A Meditation on Marriage and the End of the World"

_Four years ago._

A week before their wedding, Riza calls Gracia from a sunny café near her apartment in Central's "New Town," so named because Central only started expanding in that direction after the nineteenth century. The "Old Town" still retains a slightly gothic feel entirely absent from New Town, all light-colored stonework and large windows. She is at this particular café (one not nearly as trendy as some others in her area, but which has kindly owners that occasionally give her free things for being a faithful customer) because she doesn't want to be making this call, and so feels the need to bribe herself with a cortado and a muffin.

Gracia picks up within the first couple rings (a habit she picked up working in the flower shop) and answers brightly: "Riza! To what do I owe the pleasure?" The word missing between "the" and "pleasure" is "unusual," because Gracia and Riza don't talk much. They don't have much in common, to Riza's credit, and whenever she's alone with Gracia she realizes that with such immense clarity that she feels slightly embarrassed. Gracia's life has been easy and free of turmoil, or at least that's what she assumes. She grew up squarely middle class in a family that was happily overburdened with children, and grew up as the apple of her paretns' eye. She graduated the top of her class in high school, and then graduated the top of her class at Central U with a degree in business so that she could open her own flower shop and live a comfortable life on her own. Somewhere in that period she reconnected with Maes, and then the rest is history. Well, no. History is full of bloodshed and sin. The rest is a story.

Gracia Smith--soon to be Gracia Hughes--has never killed anyone. She has never seen a homunculus, or an Alchemist, and only cares about such things in the offhand way people care about things that they hear on the news. Riza envies her for that, but that envy doesn't translate into them being great friends.

Riza exhales as quietly as she can through her nose so that Gracia can't hear her over the other end of the phone and kneads the bridge of her nose with her middle finger and thumb. She truly does not want to tell Gracia--picture of domestic perfection that she is--that she has failed, and so she decides to lie. Not completely, but she has no intention of telling her the whole truth, either. "I need to amend my RSVP."

"Oh?" Gracia asks. "Why?"

Riza takes a sip of her cortado. "My date cancelled." It's not entirely true, but it's definitely not a lie.

Riza expects to hear concern from Gracia, maybe even pity, but that isn't what she gets. Instead she hears a laugh (one that she's remarkably familiar with, despite not knowing Gracia well, because she laughs freely and often). "What a coincidence. Would you believe that I got a call from Roy just yesterday telling me the exact same thing?"

Riza can believe it, but she can't say that she isn't surprised. She had assumed that Mustang would have a date to his best friend's wedding, but she never put much thought into who. Mustang had no difficulty finding dates, and it wasn't a wholly uncommon occurrence for his flings to disappear once they realized the full extent of what they had signed up for by fooling around with him, but she has to admit that the timing is a little suspect, a little _too_ inconvenient.

"I swear," Gracia continues. "You two are always so in sync in everything. Frankly, it's a little spooky."

"Yeah," Riza says, because she isn't quite sure how to respond to that.

"Well, anyway, I guess it'll all work out. This way you can keep each other company. I'm sorry to hear about your date, though."

"Thank you, Gracia," she says, but not for the condolences. Gracia is the sort of woman who has enough moral high ground to judge just about anyone, especially her, but she doesn't, and Riza feels immensely grateful for that.

"Not at all. I'll see you next week for the big day!"

"I'm looking forward to it." And she is. She is thrilled that her friends wil have a day to relax and celebrate something good, something new. They haven't had the opportunity to do that for a long while. And now she won't have to worry about introducing her date to her friends.

* * *

She met Thomas at a bookstore.

Ever since they had gotten back from Ishval, she had started reading more. Before they had gone, she had been sleeping better, but now that they had returned, so had the insomnia and the nightmares, so she had taken to reading at night in order to quiet down her brain. She likes murder mysteries, because it's like a book and a puzzle at the same time, and she's always liked puzzles. But there's no point, to her, in spending thousands of  _cenz_ on a book she'll finish in two nights, so she's become something of an expert on Central City's consignment bookstores. Thomas was the owner of one such bookstore.

He saw her often, perhaps once a week, coming in, buying precisely one 50  _cenz_ mystery paperback, and then returning the next week to do the same, like clockwork. And so, after several months of this happening, they struck up a conversation about books, and decided to meet for coffee the following weekend.

Thomas was tall and lanky, with a mop of brown hair that curled softly, like steam rising from a cup of coffee, and wore glasses, and was absolutely nothing like anyone she knew. She wasn't sure how the State Alchemist Program managed to attract people with such strong personalities, but it did, and so it was slightly refreshing to meet someone whose quirks didn't include burgeoning alcoholism, extensive personal trauma, or existential despair. Thomas liked books, and he liked coffee, and he liked her, and Riza found herself remarkably satisfied with that.

Her job didn't come up until they had been dating for a couple months, and this was by her design. She had run into the same issue previously, where things had been going splendidly, and then she revealed that she worked for the State Alchemist Program, and suddenly that either monopolized all their conversations or they lost all trust in her. She liked Thomas. He was sweet, and he had a cat named Bartleby who would sleep in her lap when she was at his apartment, and she didn't want to ruin this.

"Wait, so you're a captain?" he had asked, green eyes widening slightly behind his glasses. 

She nodded, hands gripping a mug of tea. "Yup. Have been for a few years now."

She readied herself for the same sorts of things she always heard when this came up, and was surprised when none of them appeared. Instead, he smiled slightly and said "Wow, I'm dating a captain. That's pretty impressive." She smiled back at him.

Save-the-date cards had gone out for Maes and Gracia's wedding not long after they had gotten back from Ishval, and Riza had had it marked on her calendar since, but she still managed to be somewhat surprised when an official invitation found its way into her mailbox.

Sitting in Thomas's warmly-decorated living room and shaking off the meager winter chill that still filled the air (she had even had to wear a scarf that day, which seemed absurd) she brought it up. "A couple of my friends are getting married this spring."

"That's exciting," Thomas said evenly. Everything about him was even: his temperament, his voice, even his breath when he was sleeping. He was like a placid lake, but one that never got disturbed, free of rocks or fish or birds. Just smooth, watery glass. Being around him was comforting.

She pulled the invitation out of her bag and handed it to him. The front was quite tastefully decorated, obviously Gracia's design, but on the back was one of their engagement photos, with Maes holding onto Gracia from behind while he grinned like a fool. Underneath the photo was a line to RSVP.

"They look happy," he said.

"They are. I've never seen two people who love each other so much. It's a little frightening." "Frightening" perhaps wasn't the best choice of words, but "unnerving" qualified. She knows that her parents loved each other, and that her father still loved her mother, even up to his dying day, but their love was never hugely open. It was something that existed between them and only occasionally bled into the rest of the world. But it's impossible to look at either Gracia or Maes and not know immediately how besotted they are with each other. It's strange to look at people and know as soon as you see them that they're happy.

"You wouldn't want to come with me, would you?" Riza asks before she can stop herself. "I mean, I know you haven't met my friends yet, and so I would entirely understand--"

"I'd love to," Thomas says, smiling. He has two dimples, one right in the center of each cheek, that Riza finds overwhelmingly charming.

And so she had marked the RSVP and sent it off the next day.

Everyone at HQ had been bugging her about it, because Maes Hughes is a blabbermouth, and if he knows about anything, then so does half of Central City.

"So, I heard you've got a date to Maes's wedding," Mustang said to her several days later.

"Wait," came Rebecca's voice from down the hall. "Riza has a date?" Rebecca sprinted from the other end of the observation deck to her desk. "Do you have a boyfriend, Riza? Why didn't you tell me? I'm supposed to be your best friend!"

"Wait, Hawkeye has a boyfriend?" Havoc asked from his desk, and Riza placed her head in her hands. Why did she tell Maes anything?

"So, tell us about this boyfriend of yours, Captain," Breda said, wiggling his eyebrows lasciviously. 

"Yeah, Captain," Mustang said, dark eyes wicked.

"There's not much to tell, really," Riza said, trying to beat down the blood flowing to her cheeks with sheer force of will. "You'll be meeting him at Maes and Gracia's wedding."

"But that's months away!" Rebecca moaned. "Can't we meet him sooner?"

"It's none of your business, honestly," Riza said. "You'll meet him soon enough."

Riza is an overwhelmingly private woman, and has been since she was a girl, so she doesn't like having her laundry (dirty or otherwise) hung up for all of Central HQ to see.

"I can't wait to meet your friends," Thomas said later that week, and Riza's stomach clenched involuntarily.

"And they can't wait to meet you, either."

She, however, could definitely wait for them to meet. She could wait forever, in fact. She knew that meeting them would be the end of Thomas's patience. Her job may have been no issue, but once he met her friends, then surely he wouldn't want to see her anymore. No, that's not entirely true. Once he met  _Mustang_. 

Mustang had a habit of accidentally sabotaging her relationships. It was never intentional, but something about his presence, his personality, and his knowledge of and closeness with Riza tended to unsettle her partners so immensely that they turned tail and fled.

She understands that the relationship she has with Mustang must look strange from the outside, particularly without the context to go with it, but she doesn't like talking about their history with people. Something about it feels very private, almost secret, like a diary or a box of old letters you keep under your bed. Perhaps because no one else who was around to witness them as awkward teenagers is still alive to talk about it, so the burden of their past together falls solely on them. Maybe if she brought that up with her partners, about how they had almost grown up together, and he had studied under her father and was the recipient of his research, they would understand, but she doesn't want to. She wants to keep those memories for herself. And so her partners have always seen Mustang as a threat, someone who has secret designs on her and who could, at any moment, sweep her out from under their noses. This is all ridiculous, of course. If he hadn't swept her anywhere when she was young and would have been more open to being swept somewhere, then he definitely couldn't now. Couldn't and wouldn't; she's a person, not an object. Mustang knows that. If he didn't then there was no way they would have stayed friends for this long.

But, lucky for them both, they would never have to find out what would happen if Mustang met Thomas, because a week before they were supposed to attend Maes and Gracia's wedding, he broke up with her. It was as amiable a breakup as she had ever had, but it had still happened, and at the most inopportune of times. There are few things more depressing than going to a wedding when you're single, but Gracia had a point: at least she and Mustang would have each other.

* * *

They would have been married in the spring, June in fact, if spring still counted as a viable season. According to Gracia's family, June was an auspicious month to marry in, due to some old Xerxian superstition. Riza doesn't think that they really need the help of superstitions in order to have a happy marriage, but sometimes people are just funny like that.

After a deliciously mild month or so, it was as if Amestris remembered suddenly that it was in a state of meteorological turmoil and proceeded to try and broil every citizen of Central City alive. The only relief from this was the one vestige of spring left: rain. It rained every day in sheets, and so for those few hours the heat was bearable. 

It's a little ironic that with all the planning that went into it, and all the signs pointing toward a frustratingly happy union, it rains on the day of Maes and Gracia's wedding. Somehow, their families' old-fashioned virtues actually paid off. It had fallen out of fashion over the last few decades to actually get married in churches, particularly in Central. The "it" thing to do was to have an outdoor wedding, at a park or a fashionable venue, but of course, for the last nine years the state of the world's weather patterns has been supremely broken, and so the likelihood of finding a day that is both cool enough to have a wedding outside without your guests dying of heat stroke and that won't be soaked by rain is a bit like playing Drachman roulette. Unfortunately for Maes and Gracia, they happened to lose that particular game of chance.

She knows that it's probably bad luck on a wedding day, but Riza likes rain, always has. She liked it up in the mountains, when the dry air would occasionally pack itself full of water until it couldn't take anymore, crying over the dry dirt and the snaggletoothed shingle roof of her father's house. She likes it even more now in the city, what with the way the concrete and stone reflect heat and sunlight onto anything unlucky enough to have to walk places. She likes the way it sends even the most intrepid of Centralites indoors, into cafés and stores and their homes, and how it makes the city clean and empty. And so, while she knows that Maes and Gracia are probably disappointed (though unsurprised) by the weather, she feels pleasantly melancholy as she drives on an unusually empty road to the church.

Riza thinks as she parks, stepping out of her car and opening up her umbrella to beat back the rain (she has done her makeup for the first time in weeks and doesn't want to ruin it) that she's never actually been to a wedding. At first she thinks that can't possibly be true--she's twenty-three, so  _surely_ she had to know someone who had gotten married--and yet she cannot think of any concrete memories of weddings. This makes sense: aside from her mother's parents, most of her family had already been alienated by her parents' singleminded, odd determination and reclusive natures. If anyone in her family had gotten married, then she hadn't heard about it, and certainly hadn't been invited. And wasn't she at the age where her friends should all be racing toward matrimony? But somehow it just hadn't panned out for any of them. Havoc and Rebecca's relationships all continuously failed; Breda was fairly private about his personal affairs, and so Riza doubts she would even know if he was in a relationship or not; and both Fuery and Falman seemed to be fairly indifferent toward romance. She figures that if all people they knew were to find someone to settle down with, it would be Maes, but she still finds it amazing that she's managed to avoid weddings for this long.

The church is old, but not as flashy and ornamental as they could have found for the occasion. But neither Maes nor Gracia came from money, and so she isn't hugely surprised at this display of modesty. There is a large stained-glass window at the far end of the chapel, displaying some story in bloody colors that Riza can't recognize. It streams into the chapel even without a large amount of sunlight, and strikes Riza as vaguely ominous. Angels always seem so harmless on holiday cards and in pictures that she sometimes forgets what angels really are: divine warriors. This one is brandishing a flaming sword and staring down at them all as if he knows a secret about them.

"Riza!" 

She looks down from the window to spot Rebecca turning around to face her in a pew near the front of the groom's side, her hair tamed from its usual tight curls to loose waves falling about the shoulders of a light pink dress.

"Hey, Becca," Riza says, smiling.

"Where's that boyfriend of yours?"

Riza's smile doesn't fade, but it does flatten. "He had to cancel."

Rebecca pouts. "Are you sure you didn't make him cancel so that he wouldn't have to meet Mustang?"

"Why would I do that?" Riza asks, despite the fact that she knows exactly why she would do that.

"I swear," Rebecca says, rolling her eyes. "Well, since you don't have a date you can sit next to me. We can be alone together." Rebecca pats a bit of the pew next to her and Riza gratefully sits down. Rebecca may be a busybody, but as long as she thinks Riza is avoiding a different question than she actually is, she won't press the issue of why, precisely, Thomas isn't there. This is a wedding, and the wedding of one of their closest friends. She doesn't want to ruin it just because her boyfriend dumped her.

They chat amiably about nothing in particular--Rebecca telling her that the color of Riza's dress is not season appropriate, a dark orange that Rebecca says would be more apt for a fall wedding, but Riza tells her that this is her only formal dress, which is true, and she wasn't going to buy a new one just for this, and Rebecca rolls her eyes again--until the organist starts up and everyone stands.

What strikes Riza the most isn't Breda, Fuery, Falman, and Havoc in smart tuxedos (something she feels that she is likely to never see again), but the fact that all Gracia's bridesmaids, hanging off their arms, look like Gracia. Not superficially, of course; they don't all have her ash-blonde bob, or her blue eyes, or her figure, or skin tone. But what they all share is a certain kind of tranquility. Not a happiness, necessarily; some of them look jittery or nervous in the way being a bridesmaid must make one nervous, but it's not a bone-deep kind of nervousness. After this is all over, they'll head to the reception and drink champagne and those nerves will be gone. Maybe they'll be replaced by different nerves (Havoc has been making cow eyes at the cute redhead who has been his designated bridesmaid since they marched in), but eventually those too will pass. This isn't a sleight against them; anxiety doesn't make you more interesting or somehow more intelligent or anything like that. Riza is sure that these women have their demons, just like anyone else. But their demons are probably less concrete than hers, abstract fears rather than gaping eyes full of teeth in the middle of a burning desert, or a black monster rising from a black sea. These women don't have to worry about that, because that's Riza's job, quite literally. Riza likes that the work she does allows these women to attend their friend's wedding with such placid eyes.

Mustang slinks in last, Gracia's maid of honor on his arm. They're a striking pair, Mustang with his Xingese eyes and coal-dust hair, and this woman, who appears to be of Cretan descent, with an aquiline nose and long, tan legs peaking out the bottom of her pastel yellow bridesmaid's dress. She stands slightly taller than Mustang, a fact that would have made someone like Havoc uncomfortable, but which doesn't seem to bother Mustang in the slightest. He knows that he has the prettiest girl in the room on his arm, and so he preens. They part at the end of the aisle with Mustang giving her a coquettish kiss on the hand, to which she laughs warmly.

Standing at the front of the chapel is Maes, resplendent in his dress uniform, smiling like a fool. A happy, happy fool. Riza would want nothing less for him.

And then there is Gracia, radiantly smiling in a simple wedding dress, being trailed by the son and daughter of a friend, and upon connecting eyes with Maes, he immediately bursts into tears, followed by not a few people in the chapel.

The ceremony is quick and simple, and when they kiss, in that strange, mysterious moment when they go from being people to being  _married_ people, she flicks her eyes to Mustang, who is smiling a little sadly at the display. When she looks back, everyone is cheering.

The reception is happening at a nearby hotel, and Riza squeezes through the crowd to the door as quickly as she can to avoid the rush. There's no point in congratulating the newlyweds there since she'll just see them in half an hour, anyway. As she is about the cross the threshold, someone places a hand on her shoulder. She turns to see Mustang.

"Hey, did you drive here yourself?" She nods. "Could I hitch a ride to the reception, then? I rode over here with Maes, and three's a crowd, if you know what I mean."

"Sure," she says, walking ahead of him. "Come on."

The first thing he does upon getting in her car is to roll down the passenger side window and light a cigarette.

"Must you smoke in my car?"

"It's been a long day," he says on the exhale.

"It's four in the afternoon," Riza responds. "And the day's not nearly over yet. Where's your celebratory spirit?"

"It'll be back in a bit. You know how spirits are." She allows him to smoke in silence for a moment, because she knows that this must be hard on him, at least a little, to see someone who he had been in love with marrying someone else, but he doesn't allow the silence to fester for long before asking "I thought your boyfriend was coming."

She find herself oddly tired as well. Maybe it's the weather, or the crowd, but she doesn't like lying to Mustang, and so she doesn't. She knows that at least Mustang, of all people, won't judge her, or pity her. "We broke up."

He turns to look at her, wrist resting against the glass of the car window. "When did that happen?"

"About a week ago."

"You don't seem too broken up about it."

She shrugs. "There's no use in being broken up about it. He didn't want to be with me anymore. If I really loved him, why would I be upset that he wanted to move on to find happiness somewhere else?"

"Did you love him? Really?"

She shrugs again. "I don't know."

He chuckles, a husky sound low in his chest. "You're a funny woman, Riza Hawkeye."

"What about you? Gracia told me your date cancelled."

He laughs aloud this time, coughing around an untimely drag. "Funny you should ask." He takes one more drag before tossing the remains of the cigarette out the window and rolling it up against the weather. "Just between you and me, it's impossible that my date could've cancelled, because I didn't have one to begin with."

"Really?"

"Really."

"You seemed pretty cozy with Gracia's maid of honor."

He laughs again. Maybe she is a funny woman, after all. She's never really thought so, but apparently he does. "She's gay."

"Oh." She has nothing to say to that, and so she changes the subject. "Well, according to Rebecca, weddings are a great place to meet people. Maybe you can find someone there."

He makes a contemplative sound in the back of his throat that Riza can't decipher. "Yeah, maybe. We'll see."

* * *

Riza thinks that she probably doesn't miss Thomas as much as she should. She's been through breakups before, usually with her being the one doing the breaking, and she's usually felt at least a twinge of sadness at the ending of whatever relationship had transpired, but for Thomas (who, arguably, she had liked best of all the men she had dated) she never shed a single tear, and she struggles to muster up any emotion more significant than nostalgia.

Watching Maes and Gracia sharing their first dance, she does feel at least nostalgic for Thomas. They had danced once, wine-tipsy in his living room to a record he liked, and it had been fun, but she doesn't think they ever looked at each other the way that Maes and Gracia are looking at each other now. They're dancing to a song by some husky-voice female jazz singer, and looking _happy_. Not the incidental kind of happiness that touches everyone, the happiness of being surprised with a day off work, or a particularly good book, or a free drink at your favorite coffee shop, but a happiness that takes your body for its home and refuses to leave.

Riza has always been fascinated with happy people, because until she went to college, she was fairly sure she had never seen one before. "Happiness" was like some word in another language that didn't have a corollary in Amestrian, and so she couldn't understand it. But she has no doubt in her mind that Maes and Gracia are happy. Perhaps not totally, in the full summation of their lives, but happy, at least, with each other, and that seems to be enough for them.

The dance concludes and Maes bends down to place a small kiss on her mouth, to which she giggles and blushes. Incredible.

As a wave of applause sweeps the hotel they're all in for the reception, Mustang taps her on the shoulder. She turns around to see him looking at her somewhat oddly. He motions for her with a finger and she leans in, him leaning his mouth close to her ear. "You look like you could use something a little stronger than champagne."

Occasionally, despite being a melodramatic bastard and a neurotic dumbass to boot, Mustang knows exactly what he's talking about.

She feels something cool and metallic slipped into her hand and sneaks a look down to find a flask of something had been given to her. She looks back up to him trying to figure out what would compel someone to bring a flask to their own best friend's wedding, particularly when champagne has already been provided, but she doesn't have to look hard. He's smiling at her, the conspiratorial smile he tends to use when he wants people to be accomplice to his bad decisions, but it's strained. She knows that if she doesn't help, he's going to drink all of whatever is in the flask by himself. At least if she participates, maybe he'll only get half. Even if he's pained right now, she wants him to remember this day. It's important, and she knows that he knows that. She also knows that her own ambivalent feelings are at odds with the happiness she should be feeling at this celebratory occasion. A little extra alcohol may loosen her up enough to act like a normal human being.

She makes sure to shoot him a look that's at least partly disapproving before scanning their table-mates--all of Maes's groomsmen and Rebecca--to make sure they aren't watching, and then deftly unscrews the cap of the flask, lifting it to her lips and taking a healthy pull. The taste of caramel and vanilla and woodsmoke meets her tongue, making its way warmly down her throat. Bourbon, then. She prefers bourbon to whisky for this reason: whisky always burns, aggressively entering your bloodstream, but bourbon is polite. Its warmth is never intrusive, sitting calmly in your stomach and making your limbs feel loose and heavy. She understands why Mustang drinks it; it's not a liquor that tends to lead to sadness, or reckless behavior, just a general mellowing of inhibitions and fears. It's exactly what she needs right now. She pats at her mouth with the back of her hand, careful not to smudge the nude lipstick she's wearing, and hands the flask back to Mustang. He takes it swiftly, tossing his head back and allowing the bourbon to slip down his throat. When he rights himself and closes the flask, he winks at her and she snorts.

By that point, the applause has died down, and Breda has noticed that something is amiss. He looks to Mustang, cocking a ruddy eyebrow, and asks "What are you two up to over there?"

Mustang looks to Riza, who looks to Breda and says levelly "Nothing."

"Uh-huh," Breda responds, looking clearly as if he doesn't believe them. "You two are always up to something, and you don't even need to talk about it. It's spooky. It's like you have some secret code or something."

"How do you know we don't?" Riza asks, and Breda looks slightly alarmed at Riza having just made a joke. She supposes she hasn't really joked around them much. 

Mustang laughs. "Yeah, Breda, you just caught us exchanging classified government secrets. We'll have to kill you now."

Breda rolls his eyes, popping an hors d'oeuvres into his mouth as he turns back around to watch Gracia dance with her father. "For two such smart people," Breda mutters, "you're both fucking weirdos."

As the ceremonial dances continue--Maes dancing with his mother, the flower girl and ring-bearer dancing with each other, etc.--Mustang and Riza surreptitiously exchange the flask between each other under the table, taking swigs while their friends are too distracted to notice. By the time the dances are over and the evening is segueing into speeches, Riza's head feels frothy and light, like her brains have been scooped out and replaced with bubble bath. She knows that she should be, but she can't compel herself to pay attention as Maes extolls Gracia's infinite virtues, a speech she has heard in various iterations probably coming up on five-hundred times now. The flask is about half-empty now, and Mustang has been kicking at her feet under the table for the last fifteen minutes, a fact he seems to find hilarious. She has been kicking back, too, and he finds that even more hilarious.

But she can register dimly, through the fizziness of her head and the strange game she and Mustang are playing that Maes is done with his speech, and has just said Mustang's name, following by a round of applause. And then, in what should be an embarrassingly slow show of cognition, she remembers: Mustang is Maes's best man, which means that has to make a speech.

She kicks at his foot with more force than before and whispers "You have to go and make your best man's speech."

He blinks slowly, and then realization dawns on his face and he hisses "Oh shit," before scrambling up from their table toward the table where the bride and groom are sitting at the front of the ballroom.

"You didn't forget about your speech, did you, Roy?" Maes asks, hand covering the microphone so that his guests won't hear.

"You're hilarious, Hughesie, absolutely hilarious." This isn't an answer to Maes's question, but he takes the microphone from his anyway, and leans on the edge of the table like a hip literature teacher. At some point his bow-tie has come undone, as well as his tuxedo jacket, leaving him looking rumpled and rakish and the absolute center of attention. Leave it to Mustang to steal the show of his own best friend's wedding. "So, I had a speech prepared for this;" Mustang says into the microphone, "a very traditional best man's speech, all about what a great friend Maes has been to me, and how happy I am for him, but then I thought: 'You all don't want to hear that.' You all know Maes, since you're here. You all know what a great friend he is, and you're all probably just as happy for him as I am. So I'm not going to use that speech. I'm going to wing it instead."

Maes turns to Gracia and whispers "He definitely forgot."

Gracia props her delicate chin in her hand. "Honestly, what did you expect?" From another woman, this might've sounded disparaging, or disappointed, but there's a distinct undercurrent of affection running beneath her words. After all, she loves Maes more than just about anything. How could she not love someone who loved him with the same kind of fervor that she did? And this was certainly helped by the fact that, all else aside, Mustang is a charming bastard (with somewhat more of an emphasis on "bastard" than "charming"), and Gracia likes charming people.

"For those of you who know me," Mustang begins, "you will know that I have known Maes _intimately_ for a long while now."

Maes's eyes widen behind his glasses, and Havoc buries his face in his hands from their table. Both Maes and Gracia's families are very traditional, and very religious. They almost certainly don't know about Maes and Mustang's past relationship, and if they did, they almost certainly wouldn't approve. His wedding is probably not the best time to bring that up.

"Let me tell you about the first time we met. Where's Rebecca Catalina?" Somewhat nervously, Rebecca waves from within the crowd. "Catalina over there was throwing a party, oh, nine years ago. We were students at Central U at the time. Well, Maes wasn't, he had graduated the previous spring, but he was there. And someone, for God knows what reason, had baked a quiche to bring to this party. Who brings a quiche to a college party? I've never figured that one out. Anyway, I love quiche, and Maes over there tried to take the last piece. Well, I wasn't going to have any of that, and so I tried to take it from him, and it fell squarely on Rebecca Catalina's carpet." There are a few titters of laughter from the audience. Conspicuously, none of them come from Riza's table. They're all nervous that he'll end up saying something he shouldn't and end up sabotaging Maes's marriage before it even officially starts. He wouldn't mean to do it; his destructive tendencies only ever really extend to himself. But still, he's obviously tipsy, and that could lead to him doing something stupid, something he'd regret. Riza is sitting stiff on the edge of her seat, ready to spring up and cause a distraction if his speech veers too much into dangerous territory.

But, for once, Roy Mustang had acquired an ounce of tact, because he doesn't go into how later that night they went on what would end up being considered to be their first date, or would come to live together, as lovers, not friends, as Maes's family thought was the case. Instead, he says "And Maes spent the rest of that party not having fun, like he probably intended, but helping me clean Catalina's carpet." He chuckles to himself, eyes a little glassy, like he's lost in his own memories. "And that pretty much set the scene for the rest of our friendship: me making stupid messes, and Maes helping me clean up after myself. You see, while I have been told multiple times that I'm a genius--" (Havoc loudly guffaws from their table) "--Maes has always been a lot smarter than me in a lot of ways. And probably the smartest thing he ever did--" Mustang turns around to look at Gracia "--was decide to marry you."

The lights around the table illuminate Gracia's eyes, and they sparkle with tears, pure and genuine. She had always feared that Mustang resented her for being with Maes. He had always been cordial enough to her, but Mustang is a skilled liar, and she knows him well enough to know that. But he can't be lying. She thinks that she would feel it if he did. He's looking at her almost pleadingly, like he just wants her to understand his words, and she thinks that she does. She hopes that she does.

The spell only lasts a moment, though, and he turns back to the audience, announcing glibly "See? I'm flipping the script. Instead of talking about how amazing Maes is, I'm talking about Gracia."

"It's always dinner and a show when Mustang's involved," Falman says to Fuery, and Fuery giggles quietly.

Mustang turns to acknowledge Maes for the first time during his speech. Maes's face is a beautiful tapestry woven through with threads of emotions of varying colors: a little somber, a little sad, mainly happy, partially embarrassed. All of these together create a picture of what a man should look like on his wedding day, and Mustang is glad that, for once, he didn't ruin something good. "You're my best friend, Maes, and I know that nothing I say comes off as sounding honest, but believe me when I say that I'm happy for you. Happy for you both. I really am."

In a voice small enough that it doesn't quite reach as far as the microphone, Maes says "I do."

Mustang laughs in a way that sounds suspiciously like someone trying to catch their breath right before crying, but Riza can't see any tears, and he almost immediately falls right back into his routine. "Well, I'm sure you're all bored of me. I sure as hell am. Let's all dance to congratulate the newlyweds!" There is a loud swell of applause, and Mustang gives a showy bow before handing the microphone back to Maes and walking quickly back to his table.

"You totally forgot to write up a speech, didn't you," Havoc asks once he returns, but Mustang ignores him, kneeling by Riza's chair.

"Do you want to go smoke?"

"I don't smoke. You know that," Riza responds, but even as she says that, she knows that he doesn't want her to smoke.  _He_ wants to smoke, but he also doesn't want to be alone. His eyes are pleading and a little bit desperate looking, and so she responds "But now is a good enough time to take it up as any, I suppose."

She follows him out of the ballroom, power-walking through the lobby in order to keep up his pace, and outside the door of the hotel. He sits down heavily on the stoop, raindrops hitting his feet, and she follows suit. He takes a cigarette, lights it between his teeth, and then exhales loudly before saying "So that was terrible. None of our other friends are allowing to get married, because I'm never doing that again."

"Do you really think any of our friends would want you as their best man?"

"Not even you?"

"I think it's called a maid of honor at that point."

"So? I'd look great in a dress. Better than Catalina, at least."

She swats at his arm. "Don't be rude."

"Sorry," he says, taking another drag. "Can I ask you kind of a weird question?"

"Weirder than whether or not I'd let you be my maid of honor?"

He laughs. "I suppose not as weird as that."

"Sure."

"Do you want to get married?"

"To you, or just in general?"

He laughs, exhaling a warm cloud of smoke. "In general."

She thinks, because she's never really had cause to before. She's had bigger problems to deal with, and was never raised on the steady diet of fairy tales that other girls like Rebecca were. She never daydreamed about her wedding day, or about being a princess. As it had never even entered the territory of dreams, it certainly wasn't a  _plan_. She couldn't really see herself getting married. Who would she want to marry? Who would want to marry  _her_?

"I don't know," she says, because it's true. She doesn't particularly want to, but she also doesn't particularly  _not_ want to. Before this conversation, marriage had always been considered as something that other people did. She had never thought of it in relation to herself.

"I don't want to," he responds quickly, taking one final drag from his cigarette and crushing it out delicately on the curb. He pulls the flask out of his tuxedo's inner pocket, screwing it open, taking a swig and handing it to her. She does the same.

"Why?" she asks, handing the flask back.

He drinks, ruminating. When the flask is lowered from his lips, he says "It just seems so pointless, tethering yourself to someone for the rest of your life. Not even counting all the other stuff--divorce, kids, lingering, existential unhappiness--it seems doubly pointless now. At any given time, we could all be destroyed by some unforeseen monster, and then what good would marriage do any of us? Yeah, sure, 'til death do us part' and all that, but what if that's not very long? What if we all get killed tomorrow? Then what would've even been the point of Maes and Gracia getting married?"

"I always figured you'd be a romantic," Riza replies, extending her hand for the flask. "Who knew you'd be such a nihilist?" He watches her drink, and she can feel his eyes on her throat. She hands it back.

"Here's the thing," he says. "I don't _want_ to be. I  _want_ to be a romantic. I _want_ to find someone, and I  _want_ to fall in love, and I would love to marry them, even with the likelihood of me being the world's shittiest husband aside. But it all just feels so...empty. Before all this, before the homunculi, everything felt like it had purpose. Like, if given enough time, everything could work itself out. But now, we don't know how much time is left before all that happens again. We could have another thousand years on this stupid rock, or we could have a week. We have no idea. And  _that's_ why I don't want to get married. I don't want to delude myself into thinking that I have something that could last forever, only for it to be taken from me." He takes the flask and tilts it all the way up, taking a long swallow before righting it again. He turns the flask upside down, shaking the last few remaining drops onto the ground before screwing the cap shut again and replacing it in his jacket pocket.

"But couldn't you say the same about normal marriage, though?" she queries. "Everybody dies, eventually. You could both die in bed together at the age of ninety-seven, or one or both of you could die in a freak car crash. It happens all the time. Life is full of random tragedy, so you just have to accept that some things are good enough to eventually accept that tragedy when it comes."

He looks at her a little desperately, dark eyes wide and searching, like a child left in a dark room alone. "But how do you do that? How do you love someone and also know that one day they won't be there anymore? How does the pleasure outweigh the pain?"

"Maybe it doesn't," Riza says, "but in the moment, I think it's worth it. And at the end of it all, that's all we have. Moments. And if I ended my life with a lot of good moments, I think I'd be happy with it."

The rain is falling steadily on the city, and even though the air is dense with moisture, it doesn't feel sticky in the same way the city normally does when the sun is shining. There are particular kinds of rain--the hard, chilly rain that occasionally hit the mountains in the winter, back when they had winter; the warm rains that swept through East in sheets in the summer, appearing suddenly and soaking everything before departing just as swiftly as they had arrived--but she thinks that this may be her favorite. This rain is neither particular warm nor particularly cold, neither too hard or too soft. It just simply is, and she can feel Central being cleansed even as the rain is still falling. She knows that this rain will nurture plants and make soil soft and hospitable for new things. 

"Do you really believe that?"

"I don't know. I've never really been in love, so I'm not sure how I'd feel then, if I thought that a little bit of happiness would be worth spending the rest of my life grieving. Although I guess it wouldn't really matter if we all died at the same time, would it?" He laughs, a little bitter, a little drunk, but mostly tired. "It's a little funny, though. When Maes told me that he had proposed to Gracia, he said it did it _because_ there was such a strong possibility that we could never have made it back from Ishval. He said he wanted her to know he wanted to marry her, even if he never came back to do it."

"Well isn't that just hilarious. He leaves me for the same reason he decided to marry her."

"Mustang, I'm not a philosopher, and I'm no expert on love. I don't know what you're looking for from me."

"I don't either, honestly." They listen to the rain connecting with the pavement, hitting loud enough to make a sound, but only hard enough to cause a dull roar, like television static. "You just always seem like you understand things."

"Now _that's_ hilarious."

He leans forward, forearms on knees. "No, don't give me the Hawkeye eye roll, I'm being serious."

"The Hawkeye eye roll?"

He nods. "It's what you do whenever you think someone is being stupid, and usually that someone is me." She cracks a smile at that. He doesn't realize that the reason her tolerance for his stupidity is so low is because she has seen first hand and countless times the extent of his brilliance, and so every time he makes a dumb mistake it always comes as a surprise, although by now it really shouldn't. "You're...wise is really the only word I can think of."

"Wise," she says, hoping he'll explain, but of course, he doesn't. That's Roy Mustang for you: constantly on the edge of profundity and ultimately deciding to keep his revelations to himself.

He leans back, palms connecting with the concrete, and looks up over their city, their desolate kingdom. In the rain, Central City might as well be the ruins of Xerxes, empty and grey, and he and she may as well be the last two people on earth. "Look at us," he says, not looking at them at all. "Two lonely singletons talking philosophy at our friend's wedding instead of enjoying ourselves like normal people."

"Since when have we excelled at enjoying ourselves like normal people?"

"You make a valid point." He watches the rain for a moment before saying "Do you want to leave?"

"Leave? The wedding?"

"Yeah."

She doesn't particularly want to leave the wedding. All their friends are there, and even though she's sitting out in the rain with Mustang talking about the utilitarian practicality of love, she's enjoying herself. And so she asks, "Do  _you_ want to leave?"

He doesn't look at her, staring up and out over the dreary Central City skyline. Even here, even in the rain, it's beautiful, and it's beautiful in the kind of way that makes her sad, particularly considering the conversation they've been having. Everything they've built, quite literally, seems so fragile, and one knock from a homunculus or an Alchemist could send the whole thing tumbling down. It'll have to fall, eventually; all species go extinct, and humans are no exception to that, and so one day their city will be gone too, but there's something particularly morbid about thinking of this on the day of someone's wedding.

"Sort of?" He gives an uncomfortable little laugh. "I'm in kind of a bad place, if you haven't noticed." 

She's noticed. He may not look at her, but she looks at him as she says "Me too."

He looks at her then, eyes wide and confused, and somewhat touched. His mouth opens like he feels he should say something to that, but no words come out.

She loves Maes. She loved Maes almost immediately after meeting him, because he's just that sort of inherently lovable person. And she knows that Mustang loves him too, loved him then, and and loves him still. But, as much as she loves Maes, her dedication to Mustang is older, and pulls at her with greater strength. 

She stands up, dusting off the back of her dress, and says "Wait right here. I'll be right back."

She leaves him gawking at her as she walks back into the hotel, making a point of scrunching up her face to look worried and rubbing her hands up and down her bare forearms, trying to look particularly put out. She wishes she could've gotten a little more damp, but this is all a bit last minute, and so she has to rely more on the veracity of her performance than the accuracy of her costume.

She finds Maes and Gracia sitting at a table of some of Gracia's friends, and is sure to shiver when Maes catches her eye.

"Riza? Is something wrong?"

"Can I talk to you for a second?"

"Yes, of course," he says, brow knit and excuses himself to go talk to Riza by the buffet. "What is it?"

"Mustang drank too much and got himself sick."

Maes, rather than being disappointed or worried, is dumbfounded. "Off of champagne? That's frankly impressive."

"No, not quite." Riza likes to mix truth in with her lies. It makes it more difficult for people to pick out the places where she's fabricated things. "He snuck in a flask of bourbon and he's apparently been drinking it all night."

Maes sighs, removing his glasses so that he can rub at his eyes. Riza is always struck at how handsome Maes really is whenever he takes off his glasses. Not that he isn't handsome when he's wearing his glasses, but without them it's like that air of fraternal geniality that he possesses drops for a moment and Riza can see the man that Roy fell in love with, that Gracia fell in love with.

"I swear to fuck, Riza," he says, replacing his glasses on his face. "It's a good thing you're as good a friend as you are, because keeping Roy from killing himself is a full-time job." She hopes he means that in the colloquial sense and not the literal sense, but she can't be really sure. The furrow between her eyes is genuine now.

"I'm just gonna take him back to my place. I've been drinking too, so I'm just gonna call up a taxi. You don't need to worry about him. Well, no more than you usually do."

He places a hand on her shoulder, squeezing firmly, but not hard enough to hurt. He squeezes her shoulder the way dads squeeze their kids' shoulders in movies about soccer or karate. Maes is destined to be a dad. "Riza Hawkeye, you are a blessing upon this wretched earth. Honestly."

She gives a flat little smile. "I'm just doing my job."

"Yeah, that's what I thought you'd say. Do you need money for a cab or anything?"

"No, I've got it covered. I'm sorry we're gonna have to leave so early."

"These things can't be helped, unfortunately. I'm just glad you made it at all, especially since your boyfriend broke up with you."

Her eyes widen. "I--"

He waves away her worry. "You can't hide things like that from me, Riza. I may be blind as a bat without my glasses, but I'm damned observant." She feels her cheeks flush in embarrassment. And after all the trouble she went to to hide that fact from him and Gracia, too. All wasted. "Please be safe on your way back, okay? And give Roy a good slap for dragging you away from my wedding."

"Will do," she says and walks back to where Mustang is waiting for her outside. "Alright," she says, "come on, we're leaving."

"What?"

"I got us out of the rest of the wedding, so we can leave."

"How did you...Why?"

She shrugs. "You were having a bad time, so there's no point in keeping you here. Plus, it's less suspicious if we leave together than if you just left on your own."

He smirks at her. "I think you and I both know that's not true."

She finds it immensely unfair that the nervous blush she got when Maes told her he knew about Thomas just won't go away, because it feels like the blood is boiling under her skin. She steps out from the covered stoop of the hotel, turning her face up to the rain in hopes that it will cool her blood a little, but it doesn't. There's something so frustratingly sensual about rain and the way it touches your skin. "Well, I don't care," she says haughtily. "Do you want to go back to my place? I have an unopened bottle of wine that Thomas left at my apartment, and he's certainly never going to get it back if you want to help me get rid of it."

He looks at her, standing rain-drenched and defiant, and she thinks he looks a little bit afraid of her in that moment, although she can't really say why. She's always heard that she's intimidating, but she never though that could extend to him of all people. She also thinks that offering Mustang more alcohol is probably not the best idea, but her head is clouded too, and she can't think of what else to do with him.

"I'd love to, actually," he says, and smiles.

Right now, they're the kind of drunk that makes them want to move, and sitting still in a cab sounds absolutely torturous, so they wander fifteen minutes to the nearest Tunnel station, and fall into adjacent seats on the nearly empty car, giggling wickedly to each other. They must look a fright; Riza's makeup has melted down her face, and Mustang keeps reaching over to trace little designs in her mascara as it trails down her cheeks, as if it were children's face paint. The old woman seated across from them, white hair wrapped in a plastic shawl to keep off the rain, looks at them with distrust, which only causes them to laugh harder.

They laugh all the way up to her apartment, and stumble through the doorway heavily, trailing water onto the floor.

Mustang giggles. "I think this tuxedo is ruined."

"Did you rent it?" Riza asks, wringing out her hair and watching as the water falls uselessly onto the tile floor.

"No, it's mine."

She pauses in her ministrations. "You just  _own_ a tuxedo?"

"Of course," he says, and he looks slightly offended when Riza laughs at him, clearly not understanding why it would be funny for him to just casually keep a tuxedo on hand.

"I'm sure it'll be fine. Just take it off and drape it over the back of the couch."

"But then your couch will get wet."

"It's just a couch. I need to take my dress off, too. This is my one nice dress; if it's ruined, I'm screwed." She reaches deftly behind her back, grasping at the zipper and pulling it down, stepping out of the sopping, orange material and folding it over her arm. She places it delicately over the back of the couch, shivering in just her bra and underwear.

Mustang is standing, still soaked, in the middle of the floor, staring at her.

"Your tux isn't going to dry itself," she says, and walks toward the kitchen. 

"Oh, uh, right," she can hear him say, and hears him take off his jacket and flop it onto the couch.

The bottle of wine--Cabernet Sauvignon, her favorite--has been sitting on the kitchen counter for weeks. It had been part of a birthday gift from Thomas, and had, for some reason, never been opened. She had started to resent the thing, and resented it even more that she had no discernable reason to drink it or get rid of it. She had considered giving it to Maes and Gracia as a wedding present, because (according to Thomas, anyway; Riza was no wine aficionado) it really was a good vintage, but re-gifting is rather tacky, and she didn't want to do that to her own friends. She pops the cork and gives the wine a tentative sip. It's a weird wine, and one she remembers that Thomas didn't like. He liked his wine sweet, but Cab Sav is dark and bitter, and always leaves a strange, peppery taste on her tongue. She likes her wine to burn.

She carries the bottle back into the living room, not bothering with glasses and finds Mustang sitting in just his boxers on the floor, back against her couch, fiddling with his phone.

"Can you believe that there are already pictures from the wedding on Facebook?"

She snatches the phone from his hand, sitting it on her other side as she sinks to the floor to sit behind him, the tops of their biceps touching. "You're gonna make yourself feel guilty doing that. Here." She hands him the bottle of wine and watches as he takes a drink.

"This is good wine," he says, handing the bottle back to her.

"Yeah, I think so too."

Only one light is on in her apartment, casting everything in a sultry, orange-ish glow and allowing a comfortable, sleepy silence to fall over them.

She must be drunker than she first thought, because when he leans his head onto her shoulder, she finds that she isn't surprised by this, and instead of shrugging him off of her, she leans her own head down next to his.

When she wakes up tomorrow, she will initially think the rest of the night's events are a dream, because it feels like a dream when he angles his face up to meet hers, and she angles her face down to meet his. When their mouths connect, she is startled by how not-startled she is. Even as his lips move to her neck, and then her shoulder as he reaches behind her to unhook her bra, she finds herself amazed at how natural this feels, as if they simply coalesced together like this, like they've been circling each other in the water for years and are just now going down the drain together. When he reaches down to take off her underwear, she breaks from him and pulls him up off the floor toward her bedroom. But even then, even as the rhythm they had been slipping into was interrupted for a change of scene, she is struck by how inevitable this all feels, like they were always destined to do this, were always destined to drink too much and sneak out of Maes and Gracia's wedding and end up fucking in her bed while the rain pelts against her bedroom window, angrier and angrier, until finally the power goes out and they're left in the dark.

Naked, she wanders into the kitchen to find some candles, but Mustang follows her and presses her against the kitchen counter, covering her face and neck and chest and belly with kisses, making it so difficult to move that eventually Riza gives up and they just touch in the darkness.

This could've lasted for minutes or it could've lasted for hours. She can't say, both because her clocks all turned off with the power surge, and because the alcohol and the endorphins and the adrenaline have made time slippery and difficult to keep a hold of. She remembers him falling asleep after making it back to her bed again, after much stumbling into pieces of furniture and door frames in the dark, and burrowing into her sheets like a den animal. He fell asleep almost immediately, the lines of his face smoothing and his dark lashes resting on his fine cheekbones. She stared at him for some unknown length of time, at the way his lips (full and pink from having been kissed and bitten and touched with tentative, curious fingertips) part with his breath, the way his fingers knit themselves almost nervously into her sheets. She finds herself mesmerized, and exhausted, and terrified, although she isn't awake long enough to figure out why.

When she wakes up, the lights are back on, and the clock on her bedside table has been reset. She rolls over from her spot facing the window, but she already knows what will be there before she does. There is no Roy Mustang, and she never expected there to be. Even after the dream-fog has cleared her head the hangover is beginning to set in, she knows that he never could have stayed, and she would never expect him to. She looks at the spot that he occupied, where the sheets are still rumpled and there is still the indentation of where his head was on her pillow. Alone and tired, unable to grip decorum with the force she usually does, she allows herself to nestle in the place where he was, letting the smell of him lull her back to sleep so that she will be able to face the day with a little more rationality when she wakes again.

(They don't talk about it, and that bottle of wine never gets finished.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so, as you might have noticed, this is not in the middle of a two-parter, and that is for two reasons: 1) The next two parter won't be for a fair bit and 2) I felt this was more appropriate here. This is also a bit different than the other two, so I don't feel too bad about messing up the scheme a little bit. Also I've been excited to write this chapter since when I started working on this fic back in March, so I was a little bit antsy to start it.
> 
> The chapter subtitle is from a conversation I was having with a friend about the Father John Misty album "I Love You, Honeybear," which is incredible, reminds me of Roy and Riza a lot, and is in the running for my album of the year, so I would definitely give it a listen while reading this chapter.


	17. Steganography

She's not really sure why her grandfather decided to get into contact with her again. He hadn't spoken to her since the death of her mother (his daughter), and figured that was how things were probably going to continue, but then, maybe a month or two after returning from Ishval, she got a letter from him in the mail.

A letter. An actual, physical letter. Honestly.

The letter was cordial enough, asking fairly harmless questions about work, and about her apartment, and whether or not she had found a husband yet ( _ha_ ). She always had the sneaking suspicion that he had heard tell of her exploits in Ishval. He was a military man as well--a brigadier general, in fact--and worked at Eastern Command in East City. He was also a nosy bastard and a terrible gossip, and so it only made sense that he had heard about what happened with Gluttony. After Ishval, the State Alchemist Program was prime fodder for the gossip mill, and not generally in the best of lights. Aside from being curious about their goings-on, he was probably worried about her. She wasn't entirely sure why; he hadn't seen her since she had been just a little girl. They hadn't seen each other in over a decade. Why should he stil care about her? She didn't particularly care about him.

But that winter he had come up to Central on what he swore was business and not a social call and they met up for coffee. Her memory of him looked much the same as the man who sat in front of her, a whippet-thin man with a large mustache and bright, canny eyes magnified behind round spectacles. The lines on either side of his mouth were deep, evidence of a life spent smiling and laughing, despite the fact that it was marred with the great tragedy of the loss of his daughter, his only child and the treasure of his life. Maybe that's what he wanted, Riza thought, to find her mother in her, since she carried her mother's face and eyes and body. But in that visit, and the ones that followed, the topic of Riza's mother never came up. Grumman acted as if they had been visiting like this uninterrupted for the last seven years, and was content (aside from some grandfatherly meddling) to simply chat with her and buy her coffee.

And perhaps it would have continued this way indefinitely, until he died or she moved somewhere far enough away for these visits to become unfeasible, if Mustang had not heard about them.

One day, about four years ago, she had announced to her staff that she was going to be having lunch off-site that day. This was nothing particularly radical, and wouldn't have even merited a comment from anyone had it come from anyone else (particularly Mustang, who had a rather decadent habit of leaving HQ to take expensive lunches), but she very rarely did this, and so it was cause for some inquiry.

"I'm just getting lunch with my grandfather," she said, shouldering her bag and preparing to leave before anyone could pry into her affairs further.

"Your grandfather?" Mustang asked.

Olivier had been passing by them, off to see the General in the war room, and tossed casually over a well-muscled shoulder (probably unsure of the gravity of what she was doing) "Yes, Brigadier General Grumman, from East."

At that, Mustang's ears pricked like an attentive guard dog. "Your grandfather is a brigadier general?"

"He's old," was Riza's response. "He's been in the military since he was a teenager. It stands to reason that he would've risen through the ranks in that time."

"But to  _brigadier general_?" 

She shrugged. "He's just my grandfather, Mustang."

"You know," he said, hooking an arm through one of hers. "I've never met any of your family." This, of course, was a lie, but a lie that only they knew was a lie. "I think your grandfather should meet your best friend."

"Ooh, don't let Catalina hear you say that," Havoc said, teeth gripped around a cigarette as he lit it with a single, cavalier hand.

"Yeah, Mustang," Riza said, flicking her eyes up to meet his. "That position has already been filled." This was also a lie. Mustang was her best friend, and they both knew this, but it wasn't good for professional morale if everyone else knew that. Everyone at HQ already gave them funny looks when they showed up to work together, so they didn't need to know the full extent of their relationship.

"Regardless," he continued, beginning to pull her to the door. "I don't think a little networking could hurt, do you?"

It was easy to forget just how ambitious he was. He did an exceptional job of hiding it, like he did an exceptional job of hiding most things. After all, who would look at Roy Mustang--all cigarette smoke and skinny jeans and lascivious mouth--and think that he'd be the suitable leader for anything, let alone the State Alchemist Program? He had had this scheme for as long as he'd been a pilot, and probably at least a germ of it since he came to study with her father, and his goal is not the selfish vanity concealed in patriotism that most of the other high-star members of the brass have. Roy Mustang has the silliest, most naïve, noblest goal of all: he wants to help people. Much of his persona had been carefully constructed, by magnifying certain areas of his personality and obscuring others, to create a character at once charming, capable, and non-threatening. He was truly dangerous, in that he was the kind of threat to an established order that you never saw coming.

And so she allowed him to accompany her to lunch with her grandfather, which, in retrospect, worked out a little too well, because Grumman and Mustang got on like a house on fire, which she should have seen coming. Both were busybodies with an ear for military gossip, had a preternatural investment in Riza, and an affinity for wine with lunch. After monopolizing the entire conversation between themselves (which she, honestly didn't mind too much; there's something comforting about watching people enjoy an engaging conversation without feeling like you need to contribute something), Mustang's phone buzzed with a call from Fuery needing him back at HQ, and Riza was left alone with her grandfather.

"I like him," Grumman said with a mustachioed smile. "And you like him too, I suspect."

Riza sipped demurely at her water. "You don't know what you're taing about, Brigadier General."

He sighed. "I do wish you would call me 'Grandpa,' Riza."

"And I wish you would call me 'Captain.'" He looked slightly hurt by this, so she explained her rationale. "I don't want anyone to think that the reason I got where I am now is because you're my grandfather."

"I don't think anyone would think that about you, dear." Riza's gaze is steely, and so he amends: "I'm sorry; _Captain_."

She never brought Mustang to one of these lunches with her grandfather again, but Grumman always asked after him. Apparently when Grumman was in Central, they would meet up to play chess, a game that Chris Mustang had apparently taught to her foster son when he was young. Grumman had tried to do the same with her when she was small, but she was never any good at it; she always got hung up in the details, of the mechanics of the turn-to-turn playing, and could never see the big picture, the larger campaigns. She didn't like losing, and so she stopped playing with him, but Mustang is relentless at things he's not immediately the best at, and has been playing against Grumman since that first lunch four years ago.

"Has he beaten you yet?" Riza asks. They're eating lunch at a nice Aerugan restaurant in the old town that Riza never would have gone to if she were paying for her own meal, but Grumman has money to spare, and so she doesn't feel particularly bad about ordering pasta that has lobster in it.

"No, not yet," Grumman says, taking a pleased sip of his Pinot Noir. "I think he will one day, though. He's a very bright young man."

"He's not that young anymore," Riza says with a smirk, dabbing at her mouth with her napkin. "He just turned thirty a few weeks ago."

"Which brings me rather nicely to why I wanted to see you today," he says, setting his wine glass down. "How old are you now, Riza?"

"You're my grandfather; shouldn't you know the answer to that question?"

"I see how it is; you call me your grandfather only when I can't remember something about you?"

Riza spears a shrimp with her fork and pops it into her mouth, chews luxuriantly, swallows, and says (only after she is sure he has waited sufficiently long to suffer a little bit) "I'm twenty-seven."

"If Mustang's not that young anymore, then neither are you."

"You're too kind, Brigadier General."

"I'm serious, Riza. You're not getting any younger, and..." He looks down at his food solemnly. "...and neither am I. I just want to make sure that you'll be taken care of when I'm gone."

There are a lot of things that she would like to say in response to that, not the least of which being that Grumman isn't particularly old, and probably still has another decade before he kicks the bucket. But also, there's the notion that he thinks he somehow has been taking care of her in some capacity. That may have been the case, somewhat, when she was a child, but he hasn't taken care of her in a very long time. No one has.

"I can take care of myself," she says, and aimlessly twirls a few strands of pasta around her fork.

He watches as she does this, but doesn't say anything. She thinks he might look a little sad, although whether he's sad on her behalf or his own she couldn't say.

She returns back to HQ in a sour mood which, she supposes, doesn't look all that different from her usual moods, and so she can't be too terribly bothered when no one notices.

"So," Mustang says, slouching against Havoc's desk, bumming a cigarette off of him when he surely should be doing something of import. "How is old Grumman?"

"Fine," Riza says and thumbs through a stack of paperwork. Mustang continues to look at her, as if waiting for a more complete answer, and when none is forthcoming he saunters over to slouch against her desk.

"Did he say that I've gotten better at chess? Because I have."

"Mustang," she says coolly, signing a quick, sharp signature at the bottom of a page before looking it over a final time and placing it at the bottom of the stack. "I have a lot of work I need to do."

"I swear, Captain," he says, placing a hand on her desk for emphasis. "One of these days you're going to work yourself to death." After that he lopes off, presumably to continue procrastinating, which is good, because she is in no mood to be his babysitter today.

She fills in the information on the sheet quickly, with little of the thoroughness she's known for, and files it away with the others. Looking at the new file, she pops a kink in her neck, and sees something out of the corner of her eye. Sitting in the same spot on her desk that Mustang's hand had been is now a small scrap of paper with Mustang's undeniably bad handwriting on it.

Mustang isn't one to pass notes. Passing notes is only fun when you get caught, otherwise there isn't enough of an audience for it to be enjoyable. For Mustang to stoop to this, he must have something to tell her that he doesn't want anyone else to overhear. Sneaking a quick glance over one of her files to make sure no one is looking at her, she pockets the scrap of paper and yawns theatrically.

"I need some coffee," she says, an announcement that is unnecessary, she realizes, but she needs to get to a room no one else is likely to be in. The small room that houses several vending machines (one of them, indeed, including small cans of coffee) is, as she anticipated, empty. Facing the vending machine as if considering which coffee to buy, she pulls the scrap of paper out of her pocket and unfolds it. Inside it reads:

_Or ng zl ncnegzrag gbavtug ng 10. V unir fbzr vzcbegnag vasbvzngvba gb gryy lbh nobhg Uhturf._

The sight of this familiar collection of gibberish sends her heart thudding. She recognizes the trick immediately. He used to leave little encrypted messages like this for her all the time as a kind of puzzle. Few people he knew liked math as much as he did, and so most people didn't get the same kind of enjoyment out of encryption that he did, and whether she enjoyed his brain-teasers or not, she always solved them. She can tell just at a glance that, as this still has the same setup as a sentence, it was probably encrypted using a Caesar cipher, which means he was either in a hurry or just lazy. Considering he took the time to not only encode a message, but slip it to her incognito on her desk makes her think the former, which makes her more nervous. What is both important enough, and secret enough, to bother encrypting it and sneaking it to her in the middle of work? What couldn't he say in the break-room, or in the car on the way back, or texted to her? She refolds the paper and slips it back into her pocket, depositing 150  _cenz_ into the vending machine and grabbing a coffee, just so no one will be able to question her motives for coming down here.

Back in the observation bay, she sits back down at her desk, even letting out a nice sigh, before popping open her coffee and taking a sip before tucking back into her paperwork. She's sure to go through a few papers before taking the scrap of paper from Mustang back out and surreptitiously placing it atop another paper.

Caesar ciphers are really hilariously simple. Each letter in the alphabet corresponds to a number between one and twenty-six. A number is chosen between one and twenty-five, and whatever number is picked, each letter in the message is shifted however many letters in the alphabet down delineated by the shift key. With enough time and gumption, anyone could brute-force their way through a message encoded using a Caesar cipher, but Riza knows that she doesn't need to do that.

When they were in university, after he moved out to live with Maes, they started leaving each other notes encoded in this way. They never contained anything particularly serious, or even embarrassing, but after living with each other for as long as they did, they started to miss the small, inconsequential things about seeing each other every day. They each always used the same shift key: if messages were from him, he used a shift of thirteen, and if they were from her they used a shift of five. She wonders if that's changed in the years since he lived with Maes, since Ishval, and the birth of Elicia, and everything else that's happened, but it seems like as good a place to start as any.

It's a fairly easy little piece of arithmetic to do in your head, and so the letters start to fill themselves in quickly. She becomes suspicious as full words begin to form themselves, but the last word sits heavy and cold as an anvil on her stomach. 

Decoded, the message reads:

_Be at my apartment tonight at 10. I have some important information to tell you about Hughes._

* * *

In the car on the ride to his apartment after work, Mustang makes no show that he's hiding anything. He's played this game before, and the fact that even Riza can't notice it makes her think that he's been playing it with someone other than her. He spats with Ed, teases her, tries to light a cigarette before she snatches it out of his hand and tosses it out the window. Everything is entirely business as usual, but his note sits like an ember in her pocket, burning against her thigh, to the point where she can't ignore its presence.

They don't talk about Hughes. Well, that isn't entirely true. He comes up in conversation just as much now, maybe even more, than he did when he was alive, but they don't talk about the circumstances surrounding his death. The day he was killed, Mustang had shown up at her apartment, sick and shaky and sopping wet, and had played his voicemail for her, on the edge of hysterics. It seemed to her like there was a lot going unsaid in Hughes's final message, but she didn't want to ask, not when Mustang was in the state he was in. But she couldn't deny that she felt the same thing that he did upon listening to it: they were never going to see their friend again, and he knew that.

"I should have picked up the phone," Mustang said, voice frantic, staring down at the offending piece of metal and glass as if it were the avatar of his guilt. 

"You couldn't have known--" she began, but Mustang wasn't listening to her, didn't come here to listen to her, and so grabbed his phone from off of her coffee table and chucked it at the wall. He continued to sit, almost catatonic, on her couch, and so she got up, calmly as she could, to retrieve it. There was a new, lengthy crack running diagonally across the screen, with small, tributary cracks branching off it. It reminded her of a map of a famous river she had seen once in a history book, but she didn't say that. She didn't say anything.

And then, when the Elrics had shown up, it was as if the whole thing was a bizarre dream. He was his usual, gallant, overdramatic self, and then he was gone.

She always figured that he had a good reason for not talking to her about Hughes's death. After all, if one thing was apparent from Hughes's voicemail, it was that he had clearly gotten on the bad side of someone, and it had to do with something he knew about the Program. And what he knew was "bigger than us," and that frightened her.

"Well, this is my stop," he says weightlessly, unbuckling his seatbelt. "I'll be off. Thanks for the ride, Captain." Riza nodded at him, not trusting herself to say anything, and watched as he entered his building and disappeared.

With Mustang no longer in he car, Ed extended his legs, letting them rest on the divider between the driver's seat and the passenger's seat. While his posture looked quite languid, Riza could tell that this was not the case when he asked with a kind of forced casualness "So, are you doing okay, Riza?"

Riza pulled out of the parking lot of Mustang's building, eyes fixed firmly on the road. "Why do you ask?"

Ed shrugs from the backseat. "I dunno. You just seem a little out of it." She tenses, waiting for the other shoe to drop, and then, just as she expected, there it is. "And after the other day, with the Flame Alchemist going berserk like that...I mean, Mustang is a pretentious piece of shit most of the time, but he could've died."

"You're right there," she concedes, the still-healing burn wounds on her palms throbbing where she grips the steering wheel.

She had been taken in for quite the tongue lashing from the General, and he had made it perfectly clear that if she deliberately disobeyed him again that she would be dishonorably discharged, no questions asked. Maybe it's a bit of her father in her after all but a flame kindled itself in her belly that she wouldn't want to be a part of any organization that would let its pilots die rather than rebuild a machine. Mustang is her first priority. She knows that now. She likes to think that, even if she was let go, she would still find a way to be able to protect him, but knows that isn't the case. The Program is so iron-clad and secretive that if she were ever demoted to being a civilian again, she would have no way of being in his life at all. And then what about the Elrics? She's their guardian on the sole stipulation that she works for the military. Without her there, where would they go?

"I, uh..." From the rearview mirror, she can see an embarrassed flush creeping onto his face. "This is kind of a weird question, but is there, um, something going on between you two?"

She gnaws at the inside of her cheek. She was stupid to lose control the way she had when his Alchemist had gone berserk. She's sure that everyone was able to see her wailing and crying and clinging to Mustang like a child. That is not fit behavior for a captain. That's not fit behavior for an adult, period, but especially not for her. She won't be silly enough to let a display of weakness like that happen again.

"No," she says flatly, and as she says it she realizes that she isn't lying. She almost wishes she were. "No, there's not."

She can tell from his posture that he doesn't believe her, and she can't blame him there. People have been speculating on the nature of her relationship with Mustang since they were both practically children. Ed's a sharp kid, so of course he would pick up on their odd dynamic. She's become acutely aware of it herself in recent days. But maybe she's just hearing things; after all, Ed never specified what "something" he was talking about. Maybe he thinks they're having a fight. Either way, her answer remains the same. There is nothing going on between them. Nothing at all.

"Why?" she asks and then, allowing herself a wicked, knowing grin, adds: "Is there something going on between you and Winry?"

She's glad he's in the backseat, because the degree to which he flails and splutters would have probably driven her car off the road if he had been sitting in the front with her. But that question is enough to keep him distracted until they get back to her apartment, and so she's thankful that she was able to derail the conversation away from her.

When they get back to the apartment, Al greets them at the door, but they can immediately see Winry in the kitchen. She has commandeered the kitchen table for one of her tinkering projects, hair tied back in a bandana. She doesn't bother looking up from her work, simply waving at them and offering up a distracted "Hey," but her shoulders are bare and freckled, and cause Ed to go as red as his hoodie and sends him mumbling angrily to his room. 

"What was that all about?" Al asks.

She shrugs, sitting down on the couch to unlace her boots. "All I did was ask him a question."

Winry doesn't look particularly like she plans on giving up the kitchen table so that they can eat a proper dinner, which doesn't particularly bother Riza. Her mind is humming so loud that she isn't sure if she could cook a real meal, and so she relents and orders them all pizza. By the time Winry finishes her project, the pizza has already gone cold. Ed, having calmed down significantly, had rejoined them in the living room and eaten enough pizza to frighten just about anyone.

The evening creeps toward ten slowly, so slowly, in fact, that it's easy to forget that there is something possibly terrible waiting for her. Ed, Al, and Winry have been trading off on picking what music to play for the past two hours while they all did homework (Riza doesn't know much about music, but she knows enough to say that Ed has abysmal taste) when she looks down at her phone, seeing it to be 9:50 and frowns theatrically, adding in a sigh for good measure.

"What's wrong?" Al asks, looking up from his engineering homework.

"I just got a text from Colonel Armstrong," she lies. "She wants me to come in and look at some possible changes they're making to the Alchemist simulations."

"They're changing the simulations?" Ed asks.

"Maybe," she says vaguely. "That's why she wants me to come in in the first place."

Winry pouts. "I knew it was too good to be true. We can't all ever be here at the same time."

Riza chuckles, walking over to where her bag is placed by the door, grabbing her boots. "It feels like that sometimes." After lacing her boots, she stands. "Well, I'm not exactly sure how long Colonel Armstrong will need me, so don't wait up. I trust you guys to not throw any wild parties while I'm away, and if you do, make sure to clean up before I get back and don't drink anything you didn't mix yourself."

"You say that like we have other friends," Ed says.

"Speak for yourself," Winry responds.

"Anyway, I better be off. Enjoy the rest of the night." And then she's gone.

They wait for a minute or so, just to make sure that she won't come in again, before Al points out the obvious: "She didn't get a text from Colonel Armstrong, did she."

"Nope," Ed says.

"Her phone didn't even buzz," Winry adds. "What's going on?"

"I asked her today and she said nothing, but that's an obvious lie." Ed huffs, crossing his arms. "It isn't like her to keep stuff like this from us."

"Ed, you're talking about the woman who was complicit in keeping Hughes's death from us," Winry points out. "I love Riza as much as you do, but I think we can all agree that she's not exactly the most open."

"Alright, placing bets now," Al says, leaning forward in his seat. "Who wants to bet she's actually going to see Mustang?"

"Oh, come on!" Ed shouts. "Who's going to bet against that? That'd be stupid."

"Well, we can't all bet on the same thing," Winry says.

"Part of me doesn't even want to know what she's keeping from us," Al says quietly, reining the conversation back in. "I mean, Winry's right: the last time we know she kept something from us, it was the fact that Hughes was dead. What'll it be this time?"

"We may never even find out," Ed says, sounding frustrated. "Who knows what other things we've never found out about? Who knows what she's hiding from us?"

"You know," Winry says, voice almost dreamy. "I trust her. If she's keeping something from us, she's probably doing it for a good reason. Her reasons were misguided last time, yeah, but she ultimately just wants to protect us." And then the lightness is gone, and Winry looks every bit like Pinako must've looked when she was young, blue eyes hard and bright, like a day so clear that it hurts your eyes to look at it. "And you know what, she's the closest thing to a mom I've had since I was a kid. And that's what moms do: they hide stuff from their kids to keep them safe. And it's not always the best idea, but they do it because they love you." There's a challenge in her eyes and in her shoulders that Ed thinks that he would very much like to meet, even though he knows that she would win. She always wins, and he's perfectly okay with that (though he'd never say that, of course).

Like most fifteen-year-old boys, Edward Elric thinks that he understands love. In that understanding, he had always thought that the instance of realizing that you're in love with someone is supposed to be climactic, earth-shattering, the kind of thing that sends you into hysterical tears or laughter, but when he realizes that he's in love with Winry, he finds that what surprises him the most is how long it took him to realize that this was the case. I mean, just look at her: who  _wouldn't_ be in love with Winry? And so all he can think of to say is "Huh."

"'Huh' what?" Winry asks, crossing her arms.

"Uh...nothing," Ed responds, cheeks blooming red. "Nothing at all."

* * *

Riza knows that Mustang's apartment building is exactly the same as hers. In fact, they were built within a year of each other, one after the other, to accommodate the refugee boom from areas that were suddenly less hospitable. While owned by the military, the only difference between their apartment buildings and any other is that theirs look remarkably like some kind of dystopian orphanage and they get a discount. They live surrounded, mainly, by civilians. Their buildings are perfectly unexceptional, particularly when compared with each other. And yet Riza has always thought that their buildings somehow  _felt_ different. Maybe it's just the presence of Mustang seeping through it. 

His building feels particularly foreboding tonight.

She hopes absently that it will take him a while to let her in, that he'll be in the middle of something, half-undressed, hair wet from the shower, something that will prolong her being in a state of unknowing about whatever it is that he has to say, but he answers the door mere seconds after her first knock, like he had been waiting on her. Which, she supposes, he probably was.

He opens the door without looking like someone who has great secrets to reveal. He's in a soft-looking grey shirt and jeans, his hair its usual level of messy but no more, and his apartment smells only like stale cigarette smoke. He looks better than he's looked in weeks, actually.

He doesn't say anything when he sees her, so neither does she, only waiting for him to move out of the doorway and let her inside.

He hasn't bothered to clean up his mess this time, and has instead placed it in neat little piles on his coffee table, unobstructed by cigarette cartons, ash trays, beer cans, or food. This is Roy Mustang when he's actually anticipating guests, a creature she has seen only rarely.

There's music playing, too, a little too loudly for it to be comfortable or organic. He's a smart man and one used to playing the system. Whatever it is that he's brought her out here to talk about, it's important enough that he thinks his apartment may be bugged, and that if it were he would be incriminated or in danger. They both would, she guesses.

"This sounds familiar," she says after the door closes. "I think I've heard it before."

"Yeah, you probably have," he says, still standing, hands in pockets, surveying his living room like someone appraising a new house. He walks over to where his little turntable (an aesthetically pleasing, but technically terrible, piece of junk) sits on the floor and picks up the record sleeve. She walks over to where he is kneeled on the floor and he hands it to her, her running tentative fingers over the cardboard, letting them trace over little rivulets of wrinkles that have found their way there over time. Mustang always handled records so reverently, like they were relics, that she feels the need to do the same. "I was going through my record collection the other day and found a bunch of stuff I listened to when I was in college. I used to play this one on nights when we stayed up too late studying."

She smiles. So  _that's_ what she was trying to remember the other day. 

She knows that most of what Mustang says to her when he's trying to pitch the relevance of vinyl  is just pretentious bullshit to justify how much money he has sunk into his record collection, but she can't deny that the sound of this album filling up all the empty spaces in his apartment is warm and homey. It sounds like hazy, pleasant memories.

"But you didn't bring me here to talk about music," she says cautiously.

She hands the record sleeve back to him and he places it gently on the ground next to where his record player sits before standing. "I take it you decrypted my note."

"Well, I'm here, aren't I?"

He smirks. "Good point. You're right, I didn't bring you here to talk about music. I brought you here to talk about Hughes." He looks at her, then past her, over her shoulder to the door, before saying "I think we should sit down for this."

She follows him to the couch and they sit at opposite ends, a good three feet between them. They've never had issues with personal space; Mustang is a naturally tactile person, and Riza has never been bothered by that, but now, being in any close proximity to him feels dangerous, even though she knows that nothing has changed (not for him, at least). He notices that she is practically hugging the arm of the couch to keep their arms or legs from brushing, but he doesn't say anything.

"Have you ever heard of something called the Human Instrumentality Project?" She shakes her head. "What about an organization called FATHER?" She shakes her head again. "I'm not surprised. I hadn't heard of them either until Grumman told me about them."

Her eyebrows knit. "Grumman told you what now?"

He scratches nervously at the back of his neck. "I suppose I should fess up here. I haven't actually been playing chess with your grandfather. Well, not _just_ chess, I suppose. We've been gossiping."

"I'm shocked," she says blandly, because that is the least surprising thing she's ever heard about her grandfather. He's always been a gossip, and he's found his perfect match in Mustang. 

"He tells me confidental military secrets," Mustang continues, "in exchange for information about you." To his credit, he looks a little embarrassed, which is good, because he should be embarrassed.

"Excuse me?"

"He said you won't tell him anything about yourself, that you only ever smalltalk, and he's worried about you, Hawkeye. You're his only living grandchild, and so yeah, I figured I'd tell him that you've acquired some children and that you got into a tussle with the General."

"That's none of your business, Mustang," she says, an angry flush creeping down from her ears. She doesn't like being talked about behind her back, even by people who love her. It feels like a breach of privacy.

"Yeah," he says, "maybe not, but this is: Grumman knows a lot about the military, and he managed to tell me a rather interesting fact."

She feels like a pouty child, crossing her arms, but she's annoyed with him, with the way he thinks he can use her life as a bargaining chip, but her curiosity wins out in the end, and so she asks "What?"

"You and your father were the only two survivors of the A.M.S _Flamel_ , right?"

"Right," she says warily.

"Apparently, that's not true."

She narrows her eyes. "What do you mean?"

He leafs through one stack of papers until he finds the one he's looking for and hands it to her. She takes it, holding it in steady, cautious hands, and looks down to see a paper covered in the blocky capital letters typical of military documentation, dated fifteen years prior.

"What is this?" she asks.

"There were actually three survivors: you, your father, and another researcher, a man named Van Hohenheim."

"Van Hohenheim?"

He nods. "The paper you're holding is the only documentation in the entire Amestrian military database that has him on it at all. I know this, because I had Sheska from archiving look through everything. But it's like after you got back, anything verifying his existence got retroactively expunged."

"Why? Who is he?"

"Nobody in Central knows, or if they do, they're not willing to say. And so I asked Grumman about it, and it turns out your grandfather knew the guy. He was a researcher at Eastern University, a real kooky guy, obsessed with studying alchemy. Apparently he knew your father. According to Grumman, they didn't get along; intellectual differences, or something."

She wracked her brain, trying to place a face to the name, but her memories of the _Flamel_ are so filmy, and trying to get through the haze of the death of her mother doesn't yield much other than pain.

"So Grumman did me a favor and did some digging through Eastern's archives, and found out that Hohenheim had published a paper about Alchemists a full twenty years before the Greed attack."

"But that can't be possible."

"Anything is possible," he says, and hands her a thick packet, bound together by a binder clip. A title in thick bold reads at the top of the front page:  _Contemporary Implementation of Medieval Alchemical Techniques: The Possibilities of Robotics, Science, and the Human Soul._  She reads the first few pages and find details regarding the piloting of Alchemists, their structure, and even plug suits, all things that were supposedly "innovations" made in the last ten years. 

"I dog-eared a page. You should look at it." 

She thumbs through the corners of the packet and finds the page he mentioned. Two sentences are underlined deeply in black gel ink: "In order to link the mind of the pilot with the Alchemist, you must have a medium for the pilot's thoughts to travel through. For this I propose a substance I shall refer to as Philosopher's Stone Liquid, henceforth shortened to 'PSL'."

"Wait," she says, closing the packet. " _That's_ what PSL stands for? 'Philosopher's Stone Liquid'? That doesn't make any sense."

She hands the packet back to him. "I told you, the guy was obsessed with alchemy. But, here's the thing..." He looks down at the file in his hands, worrying at a corner with his thumb before saying "His science is sound. It's based in Medieval alchemy, and it goes into some weird, pre-Enlightenment metaphysics, but it's sound. I've read the whole article cover to cover, multiple times, and the stuff he's saying...it's hard to explain, but I know it's true. I mean, look at what happened to Kimblee: he went berserk, and when we found him, he had been separated into all his component elements inside his entry plug. Hawkeye, that's alchemy."

She rubs at her eyes, because she honestly can't believe what she's hearing. "Mustang, are you trying to tell me that you think Alchemists run off of real alchemy? That's absurd!"

"What kind of science have you seen that can do the kinds of things the Alchemists can do, huh? Tell me."

"Mustang, they're called Alchemists because of an aesthetic choice. The sigils, the name of PSL, they're all just thematic--"

"But what if they're not?" His eyes are bright, the same as they were whenever he had cracked a mystery, decrypted a code. He had looked this way when he had stumbled down from her father's study to tell her that all her nightmares were real, and so were monsters.

"Alchemy isn't real, Mustang, it's pseudoscience, that's why people don't do it anymore!"

"But what if it wasn't pseudoscience? What if people were just doing it wrong?"

"So you can turn lead to gold now, is that it?"

"You can believe in giant monsters but you can't believe in this? Is this really such a leap of faith?"

Sometimes it feels like all she ever does is take leaps of faith, and frankly, she's tired of them.

Seeing that she won't be swayed, he hands her another file, this one watermarked with an insignia she doesn't recognize. "What's this?"

"It's a contract between the State Alchemist Program and an organization called FATHER. It's an agreement to participate in an initiative known as the Human Instrumentality Project."

"Which is what, exactly?"

"Use those hawk eyes of yours and read the file."

She rolls her eyes, but does as he asks, reading aloud for good measure. "This contract hereby confirms the cooperation of the State Alchemist Program and FATHER in the Human Instrumentality Project, whose aim is to produce a philosopher's stone for the betterment of mankind." She looks up at him incredulously. "You can't be serious."

"I wish I wasn't."

"So you, Van Hohenheim, _and_ the people who run our organization all believe in this bullshit. That's comforting."

"Not just that," he says, "look at the signatures."

She does, seeing among them not only the signature of Ling Yao, the current prince of Xing, but also someone who wrote in simply "Wrath."

"Who is 'Wrath'?"

"Look at the people who signed. Do you notice anything?"

"There's the prince of Xing, the tsar of Drachma, the prime minister of Creta, and the president of Aerugo."

"What's missing?"

"Someone from Amestris, I guess."

He looks at her, saying nothing, waiting for her to connect the dots on her own.

"What?" she asks.

"The only country not represented is Amestris, but we know that we're involved. It only makes sense that this Wrath person is from here, and probably connected with the Program."

"What, so you're saying that General Bradley is writing under a _nom de plume_ in order to back up this bizarre treaty founded in Dark Age magic?"

"But why would he write under the name 'Wrath'?"

"I don't know. That makes him sound like a homunculus. I mean, Greed, Gluttony, Lust, Sloth, Wrath..."

There is his meaningful look again. 

"No. There is no fucking way you called me here to tell me that you think our general is a homunculus who for some reason wants to make a philosopher's stone."

"But I did," he says.

Riza stands, pacing, because she wants to scream at him for being ridiculous, maybe slap some sense into him, but that's inappropriate. "Do you hear yourself when you speak? You sound insane, Mustang." And then it dawns on her: "Are you drunk? Or high? Or both?"

"No," he says seriously, shoulders a grim line. "I haven't touched anything since after my birthday."

Her arms fall open. She can't help herself. "Really?"

He nods. "I swear. I've been consumed with this. I haven't wanted to clog up my mind, because since Hughes died I've felt like I was on the edge of a breakthrough. Hughes got there first, because he's always been smarter than me. I think that's why they killed him; he figured this out and they didn't want him to tell anybody. But he was going to tell me the night he was killed, so he never could. I think I've almost got back to the place he was at. I'm just missing a few final pieces."

In a lot of ways, bringing up Hughes is like speaking the name of God: it has a tendency to sanctify any conversation and makes her feel oddly impious. And she knows, as much as she wishes she didn't, that he wouldn't bring Hughes into this if he didn't think it was worth believing.

"I know what I'm saying sounds crazy, but I need you to believe me, Hawkeye. I need someone to believe me, because I'm pretty sure I'm next on their list, and if I die, I need you to pick up my research where I left off."

"What?"

"Come on, Hawkeye, don't tell me you haven't noticed. The elevator conveniently breaking down with me in it during the Sloth attack, the General wanting to eject me during the last test. They know that I know, and they want me dead."

"That's ridiculous. So you know that they believe in alchemy. So what? It's embarrassing, yeah, but it's not worth killing someone over."

"That's not why they want me out of the way. It's what they plan to do with that alchemy that makes them dangerous."

"What? Flood the market with gold?"

"Hawkeye, do you know how to make a philosopher's stone?"

"No, of course not."

"You need a lot of stuff, not to mention a complicated transmutation circle, but the primary ingredient for a philosopher's stone is human lives."

She blinks at him, as if she were staring at a particularly harsh light. "What?"

"I think that's why almost everyone on the _Flamel_ died. I think that's why it took us so long to get to Ishval. They're laying the foundation for a philosopher's stone, and a big one at that."

She wants to disagree with him, wants to fight back as she has been doing, but finds that, against her own better judgment, she believes him. Something has always rubbed her the wrong way about how the Program has handled catastrophes, but she had always dismissed it as military incompetence. But he's claiming that this incompetence was precisely engineered to take human lives, and she finds that she can believe that. She doesn't want to, she wants to believe that they're doing good, but she believes him.

"But why?"

"Philosopher's stones allow people to bypass the laws of nature. Who knows what someone could do with one the size of the one they're making?"

She wants to say something, but she finds that all of her words have dried up on her tongue, and the only ones she's left with are "I won't let them kill you."

"Hawkeye--"

"No, I won't. I'll die before I let them touch you."

"That's all very noble, but what about Ed and--"

"You know how I feel about this," she says, eyes staring straight into the pits of his, waiting for those small abysses to swallow her up. "When I said I would die for you, I meant it."

"The research is more important than--"

"I don't care," she says, and balls her hands into fists on her knees, wincing slightly as her nails dig into her bandages.

He looks down at her hands. "Are those bandages? What happened to your hands?"

Self-conscious, she crosses her arms to hide her hands from view. "Nothing, it's no big deal."

"Wait a minute," he says, and she can see the gears of his mind working behind his eyes before he says "You didn't open my entry plug by hand, did you? When they ejected me?"

She tries to be as blasé and rational-sounding as she can when she says "We had to get you out. I wasn't just going to let them carry your entry plug somewhere and open it mechanically."

He groans. "I swear, after all this talk of me being an idiot, then there's you. Come on, let me see."

"No."

"Come on, Hawkeye, don't be childish. Let me see your hands."

She thinks it's kind of funny that he's calling  _her_ childish, but there's no point in fighting him on this, so she holds out her hands for him to examine. She had accidentally reopened her wounds, and now there is a thin line of red on each of her palms, clear through the bandages.

"Those will need to be changed," he says. "Wait here, okay?" He trots off to the bathroom and she is left on the couch, staring at all the things he has shown her. There is significantly more there than what he had actually handed to her, and she's sure Sheska from archiving must have had a grand old time digging through everything that the military has on file, but she's sure that Mustang has had an even better time reading through all of it. But still, the fact that he hasn't drank anything, or taken anything, sits oddly, but well, with her. He looks much like his old self, the one who would do the _Central City Times_ crossword every Sunday in ink, writing complex equations on her bathroom mirror in dry erase marker so that she would have to either solve them or erase them in the mornings before she could get ready. His mind hasn't had anything to set itself to in years, and he has wilted for it. But, oddly, Mustang looks more alive now that Hughes has died than he has since they were in Ishval.

He returns from the bathroom with scissors, a roll of bandages, cotton balls, and antiseptic solution, and he kneels on the floor in front of her. "Alright, give me your hands. We need to get those bandages off of there."

She finds herself enchanted with this new, old him. This is the way she had expected him to grow when they were both young and bright, when he had dusted her off like a forgotten family heirloom and she had shone again. His eyes are sharp and kind and his hands are sure and steady as he gently unclips the bandages from around each of her palms. He is amazingly tender as he takes the disinfectant to her wounds, and she is so astounded by him that the burn hardly registers.

"You have no room to cast aspersions to my intelligence," he says, gently dabbing at the wound in her right palm. "You could've burned off your hands. What were you thinking?"

"I wasn't," she admits, watching mesmerized as he winds a bandage delicately around her left hand. 

"You should've waited until someone else came and got me out."

"I couldn't."

He exhales, long and low, through his nose. Both of her hands are bandaged now, and he runs a thumb over the bandage on her left palm. Something squirms low in her belly, and she realizes that the record has clicked to a stop.

"I guess I can't really say anything," he says, and she wonders if he's still talking to her or if he's talking to himself. "When you got knocked out in the elevator and I saw Sloth trying to break in to get to me, I was convinced you were going to die. I know now that it was coming for me, but all I could think of was that I was going to beat that son of a bitch with my bare hands if I had to."

"I don't think that would have been very effective," she says, and her voice sounds small, almost frail. She sounds young.

He laughs, deep in his chest, a cello kind of laugh. He would've been suited to cello, she thinks. No, not cello: violin, something complicated and fast that commands attention. He would've been a perfect concertmaster, if things had been different. He would've been better suited for anything but this: binding up her hands and talking about death. He deserves more than this. They both do.

"It was so odd, though," he says, smile fading. "I was sure you were going to die, but I just couldn't imagine what my life would be like without you. And that's not me trying to be poetic; I just couldn't do it. You've been a part of me for so long. Who would I be without you?"

"You'd still be yourself."

"You know, sometimes I wonder if that'd be true."

She can't imagine occupying the same kind of importance in his life that he does in hers. She's just Riza; occasionally she's Captain Hawkeye, but she still finds herself to be unremarkable, ordinary, plain. Mustang is a bright-burning star of a man and she's a dry little planet at the edge of his solar system.

"Do you remember Hughes's wedding?" he asks, still staring at her hands.

Her chest feels hot suddenly, and she feels slightly sick. "What about it?"

"We talked about marriage. About whether or not it was worth it knowing that you could die."

"Are you proposing to me?" she asks, feeling dizzy and pinned to the couch, like she's on one of those spinning rides at the fair, the ones that keep you stuck to the wall even though the floor has dropped out from under your feet.

He laughs. "God, no, that'd be silly. I was just thinking, maybe you were right. You said that with enough happiness, any pain would be worth it. Right? I mean, I'm paraphrasing here. And I think about that a lot. And when I saw you lying on the floor with your head bleeding and a homunculus looming over us, that's what I thought of. And I thought of how stupid I thought Maes was for proposing to Gracia even though he never knew if he'd be able to follow through on it or not. And all I thought was I couldn't stand to die without you knowing that I lo--"

For some reason, she can't bear to hear him say it out loud. They've spent so much of their lives together avoiding that innocuous, poisonous, sweet little four-letter word, and she can't hear it now. It would sound like giving up. It would sound like accepting the inevitable, and she can't have that, so she somehow manages to unstick herself from where she's sitting to cover his mouth with hers and swallow the word before it ever gets past his lips.

He places a hand on either side of her face and pulls away for air, tries again vainly to say it, but she dives back to his mouth before he can. If she has to swallow it every time he tries to tell her, she will. Somehow, "love" just sounds so final. It sounds like "goodbye."

* * *

Envy likes wearing Captain Hawkeye's body. They think it fits them much better than it fits her, but Envy just wears most things better than most people, so it stands to reason that they would wear Riza Hawkeye better than Riza Hawkeye ever could.

It's a nice night to kill someone. The air is thick and pregnant with the screaming of insects and night-birds. It feels like the kind of night that should be spent doing wicked things, and Envy plans to spend their night doing just that. It's been a while since they've killed someone, and they've been dreadfully bored, acting as Wrath's underling and making everyone tea when they could be showing off precisely how smart and crafty and merciless they are. But they finally got the order cleared from Wrath: they can kill Roy Mustang.

And, both for poetic justice and logistics, they were to do so as the Captain. That way they could, quite literally, kill two birds with one stone: Riza Hawkeye would show up on every security camera in Mustang's building as the last person to see him alive. And she was always a warlike little thing, strapped down with guns and such. Envy is a smart homunculus: they know exactly what kind of gun she tends to carry when she's not at work, so they'll be able to trace the deed back to her quite easily. And then, given a month or two, the Captain, stripped of all rank and title, would be taken before the firing squad, and that would be the end of the ballad of Roy and Riza. Envy thinks it's fitting.

Or, at least, they would. But they're grumbling as they step out of their cab only to see a familiar car in the parking lot of Mustang's apartment building. It seems that Captain Hawkeye is already here. They're not sure how they didn't account for this, since they are attached at the fucking hip. They want to know what they're discussing up there, in that stuffy little matchbox of an apartment, and they halfway consider dressing up as a delivery person, or some other harmless stranger, to get up there, but they think: no. This isn't worth doing if they can't put on the full show.

"This is your lucky night, Roy Mustang," Envy says, Captain Hawkeye's husky voice melting into their own nasal timbre, letting her features slip away. "Oh well. There will be plenty of other nights to kill you." They reach for their phone to call up another cab, staring up to what they guess is the forty-seventh floor, watching as the light in the window of an apartment that may be Mustang's winks out.

* * *

Riza has been lying naked in his bed, tracing a finger over the tattoo on Mustang's back for the last half hour, like a seer trying to scry some kind of divination out of it. It seems particularly ominous now, sleeping under his skin like a bad omen, but she's never been able to look at it up close like this, for such a prolonged period of time. Mustang is content to be petted, practically purring as she gently runs her finger along his skin.

"I always thought you hated my tattoo," he says, voice lazy and content.

"I don't know how I feel about it, honestly."

He props himself up on his elbows to look at her. And then, as if he were speaking a secret password or a magic phrase, he says her name: "Riza."

Her eyes flick to his unbidden. She can't help herself; that is her name, and so she feels compelled to look to whoever is speaking to her, but hearing her name on his tongue--her first name, _her_ name--feels strange. Not bad, but strange. 

And so she decides to try the same: "Roy."

He smiles. "I haven't heard you call me by my first name in a really long time. I wish you would do it more often."

"But I can't. Especially now. This..." She doesn't precisely know what to term whatever it is that they're doing. "Dating" doesn't feel right, but "fucking" doesn't fully describe it either. "We can't let anyone know about it. Your security is compromised enough as it is."

His smile flattens. "Yeah, I know." He reaches up to run a hand through her hair, gently, from root to tip. She feels naked with her hair down. Well, more naked than she already is. She feels unpinned, floating, like a loosed kite. "Can you stay here tonight?"

"No, I need to--"

"Please, Riza?"

She doesn't want to go back, not right now, with Roy's bed being warm and the lights being low and her body being tired and heavy-feeling. She doesn't want to go back and see herself in her own mirror, because she feels like she'll look different, like something about her features has softened out under his hands. 

She lays back down so that he's looking down at her now. "Fine. But I need to head back before sunrise."

"Fair enough," he says, and lays down so that he is looking at her on her level.

"I really don't--"

"I love you," he says, interrupting her. She is so shocked that she forgets where her sentence was going. It doesn't sound like she thought it would, not like a declaration of war, or a means to an end, or a farewell. It simply sounds like a statement of fact, and against everything she wishes, she  _likes_ it. She wants to hear him say it until it no longer sounds like a sentence, until it's just three meaningless syllables. People can't take meaningless syllables away from her. Words only have power when they have meaning, and next to these words she feels powerless, the holder of something small and fragile and under attack. 

She'll die for this, and she knows it, so she doesn't trust herself to say it back to him, can't completely finish the spell, so she simply moves closer to him, placing her mouth on his collarbone and biting her tongue. She wishes she didn't believe the things she had said outside of Maes and Gracia's wedding, because then she could back out of this. But she still stands by her statement: even if she were to die in her sleep tonight, this would be worth it. She won't let him die, not while she still has blood left to bleed, but if this were the last thing she were to experience before death, she doesn't think she'd have many regrets.

"I love you, too," she mumbles into his collarbone, where she hopes he can't hear her.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title refers to the art of hiding something in plain sight.
> 
> Also, the album that Roy is playing when Riza gets to his apartment is American Football's self-titled album, because Roy is human garbage and would listen to Midwest emo.


	18. "On a good day, you can see the end from here."

Her paperback mystery novels did not accurately prepare Riza for conducting an affair. There was significantly less sex against walls than she was told to expect, and significantly more talking.

Sex is complicated to do logistically, because there are only so many excuses she can come up with to be at his apartment for extended periods of time, and so they have come up with intricate plans to meet at other places. Never the same place twice; everywhere has security cameras, and everyone in Central has an agenda, so they can never know who is listening to them, or who knows who they are. And so they exchange notes, always coded, in complex, secretive ways: laminated with tape and slipped inside cups of coffee. Hidden under stacks of paperwork. Written on receipts for lunch he had offered to pick up for her.

 _Pbssrr fubc. Erchoyvpn, ba sbegl frpbaq naq Neobe. Sbhe CZ._ Pinned to the inside of her umbrella on a rainy day. "Coffee shop. Republica, on forty second and Arbor. Four PM."

They never do anything during these clandestine meetings. It feels like espionage, which she supposes it kind of is since they are harboring top-secret knowledge about the government, but mainly it feels like they're wearing disguises. They're trying on what it must be like to be normal people, out on a normal date. They don't touch much, maybe just her boot resting against his shoe, or, if they're feeling particularly adventurous, holding hands atop the table. They bicker over whether or not she'll allow him to buy her coffee for her (she won't), just like a normal couple would. She scolds him for putting too much sugar in his coffee. She catches him smiling at her when she goes to pick up her croissant. It's all very normal, and all very dangerous. They never become regulars anywhere, but that's okay.

They talk about nothing: the weather, movies, what she's wearing. 

She only allows herself to go to his apartment once a month, always on different days of the week, so it doesn't look like she's been planning this, even though she has, has calculated it to make it seem the most random, cross-referencing her reason for going with Roy to make sure they're on the same page. And there's sex, sure, because of course there is. They've gone so long without being able to touch each other, and even though sometimes touching him feels like disarming a live bomb, like something is going to go wrong any second and get all of them killed, it's worth it.

But what is truly the most amazing part of all of this is that they can finally be honest with each other. The baroque lies and omissions of truth are pointless now. They're no longer hiding how they feel, and have switched in the opposite direction. She wants to tell him everything. She wants him to tell her everything. She hasn't had such a thirst for knowledge since she was a girl, secretly poring over her father's research with Roy under the humming light of her childhood home's kitchen lamp.

When she sneaks into his apartment, they rarely stop talking. He tells her about all of his sisters in incredible detail, about his foster mother and what little he knows about his birth parents. He tells her about Maes, and about piloting an Alchemist, and about his plans for the future. He shows her all of his favorite books and records and movies like they're teenagers, like he's trying desperately to describe things about himself that he can't articulate.

They're lying in his bed, listening to a man with a high, thin voice sing about death. She has learned that Roy thinks about death a lot, but, then again, so does she. The only time he is ever silent is when there's music playing, and she tries to replicate something like the awe he expresses when he listens to something, but she can't. He closes his eyes, his hand tracing complex patterns on her shoulder. Maybe they're transmutation circles. She's learned a lot about those recently, but she isn't sure she could recognize one if she saw it. She settles for watching him. Having him this close is still strange, but it's nice. It's like spending the first night in a new home, but one you're excited to live in. It's unsettling but good.

"What was your mother like?" Roy asks suddenly, eyes still closed. "I never met her."

He's asked her questions before, but somehow this has never come up before. "She was..." Riza muses, trying to figure out a way to phrase her thoughts. "A lot like my father in a lot of ways. Very stern, but more affectionate than he was. She liked to listen to the radio, particularly the classical stations. She liked to read."

"Did she look like you?" he asks, opening his eyes to look at her.

"So I've been told," she says. "I don't remember her very well. I was twelve when she died, and my father destroyed all our photos of her. If you asked him, we were practically identical."

He grins. "So she was beautiful, then."

She rolls her eyes. "You've seen too many movies."

"Oh, come on, I'm being serious!"

"Has anyone ever told you how corny you are?"

"You're the one lying in my bed, so clearly I'm not  _that_ corny," he says, tickling at her ribs. She giggles despite herself, swatting at his arm. He stops tickling her upon hearing a click from the corner of the room. He places a kiss at the base of her neck. "Hey, you should flip the record over."

"Are you really kissing me to try and convince me to flip the record for you?"

He kisses the other side of her neck. "Maybe."

She extricates herself from his arms, grumbling about him being lazy, and kneels before his record player. 

"Okay, so how do I work this?"

"It's really easy," he says. "You just flip the switch to raise the arm and then--" He's interrupted by a knock on the door.

"Who could that be?" Riza asks. She walks over to the door and peers through the peep-hole to see a blonde woman standing in front of the door. "It's a woman," she says.

"A woman?" he asks. 

The woman knocks again. She doesn't look particularly threatening. Something about her strikes Riza as off, but not necessarily dangerous. 

"What does she look like?" he asks.

"She's blonde. That's about all I can tell."

"Is it Olivier? Or Winry?"

"No, it's...It's just some woman." It's like something about her won't let Riza's mind latch onto any of her features, and so she can't find anything else distinct to say about her.

"That's still odd." He gets off the bed, padding into the living room. He places a hand on her shoulder and peers at the door, just as the voice of the woman asks "Mustang? It's Captain Hawkeye. Can you let me in?"

The hairs on Riza's arms prickle. "What? Is someone impersonating me to get into your apartment? Is this some kind of weird joke?"

Another series of knocks sounds on the door, followed by the woman again asking "Mustang? Are you in there?"

"Go into the bedroom and lock the door," he cautions.

"No, I'm not going to leave you out here." She takes his hand off her shoulder and begins to walk to the door. "I think that this person should have to confront the real Captain Hawkeye if they're going to pretend to be me."

"Riza--" He reaches out to stop her, but she opens the door before he can.

She may not quite have Roy's knack for one-liners, but she has a very pithy remark about imitation being the sincerest form of flattery prepared, but it dies immediately upon seeing the person standing in the doorway.

It isn't someone pretending to be her. It _is_ her.

"Oh, _come on,_ " the person with her face says with her voice. "How are you even here? Your car wasn't parked here."

"I walked," Riza says dumbly. She hasn't driven to Roy's apartment since he had replaced the bandages on her hands. Her car is registered with the Program for a parking pass, and so anyone from the Program who was driving past would know she was there. And besides, it wasn't that far of a walk.

They sigh, squeezing past Riza into Roy's living room. "That's fine. At this point, I've given up on the whole poetic justice thing. There's enough evidence on the security footage for this to work, so I'll just slip into something a little more comfortable." Riza watches, wide-eyed as her face and body melts into the face and body of the intern.

"Invidia?" Roy asks.

"My real name is Envy," they say, tossing their hair over their shoulder. "And yes, before you ask, I am a homunculus, so you don't need to waste your breath. After all, you won't have it for much longer." Envy reaches into the waistband of their jeans and pulls out a handgun.

They're fast, inhumanly fast, but when Riza sees the gun aimed at Roy, her world constricts to a single pin-hole. As Envy pulls the trigger, it's as if her muscles twitch of their own accord, and seconds later she is covering Roy's body with her own on the floor.

Envy scoffs. "See? This is why I didn't want you to be here. You're an annoying one, Captain; even more annoying than your standard, garden variety human."

Riza is glad that Envy apparently has an affinity for monologuing, because it gives her time to think. She looks down to see Roy wincing, and a line of red blooming along his shoulder. She had managed to knock him out of the direct line of the bullet, so he's not dead, but it still clipped his shoulder. 

But, unfortunately for Envy, Riza Hawkeye is rightly paranoid and always prepared for worst case scenarios. She never goes anywhere without at least one gun, especially not now, and she has a small pistol strapped to her thigh. She grabs it from its holster, raising it toward Envy.

"Oh, you're going to shoot me?" they ask, grinning. "Go ahead and try. Be my guest." They open their arms, giving Riza an open target, letting their gun dangle uselessly from their hand.

This seems too easy, and Riza doesn't trust them, but she can't argue with the fact that they are giving her a golden opportunity and she is worried about them trying to shoot Roy again. And so she releases the safety, aims, and lands a shot square between Envy's eyes.

And yet, instead of dropping dead to the ground, Riza watches in horror as their head rocks back on their neck and then begins to rebuild itself, first bone, then muscle, and finally skin. With their head fully reformed, they pop a kink in their neck and spit out Riza's bullet into their hand. "Neat party trick, huh?"

"How did you do that?" Riza demands.

They roll their eyes. "I told you; I'm a homunculus. We're damn near impossible to kill, which is unfortunate for you two lovebirds." They raise their gun again, aiming it at Roy. "Say goodbye, Roy Mustang. You've been allowed to live for too--"

While Envy was busy soliloquizing, Riza was busy thinking. She had taken stock of how long it took for them to regenerate, and while it wasn't long, it was enough for them to make a quick break, and so she lands another shot to Envy's head, as well as one to each of their knee caps.

Quickly, before Envy's bones start to stitch themselves back together, she turns to Roy. "Can you walk?"

He looks at her with something akin to fear, and she realizes that he's never seen her shoot someone before. She had hoped this would never happen, but they don't have enough time for her to philosophize. "Yeah, I think so."

"Good." She snakes an arm under his torso and lets some of his body weight fall on her as she lifts him to a standing position. Frantically, they maneuver through Roy's living room, and they make it out the door just as Envy's eyes begin to form again in their skull.

* * *

Once their eyelids have reformed and they can blink a couple times, Envy looks around to see that Mustang and Hawkeye are gone, leaving a trail of blood behind them. Envy growls low in their throat. Why is Roy Mustang so goddamn hard to kill? By all accounts, he isn't that extraordinary, but he's got some particularly infuriating friends. Envy punches Roy's wall so hard they feel several of their knuckles shatter, and watches with disinterest as they remake themselves. Immortality lowers the stakes on just about everything. When nothing has consequences, there's no excitement. Humans are so fragile; they must live in a constant state of ecstasy. Except for Mustang. He's practically a fucking cockroach. Every time Envy gets close to killing him he just scuttles away to hide under another rock. 

Begrudgingly, Envy phones up Wrath. There are a few things they'd rather do than admit defeat again, but this was truly getting out of hand.

"Hello?" Wrath answers dispassionately. It is the middle of the night. He was probably snuggled up with that squishy human pet of his when he heard Envy call.

"Bad news. I showed up at Mustang's place and shot him, but he got away."

"He got away?" Wrath asks, icy tone belying what is, surely, rage.

"His bitch of a girlfriend was there, and she's a fucking terror with a handgun. I thought humans were supposed to be compassionate?"

"Captain Hawkeye was there?" 

"Yeah. She had her hair down and everything. They must've been real fucking comfy before I showed up. I thought she was gonna die on the spot when she saw me, because I showed up as her."

"Where are they now?" Wrath asks. Envy had expected more of a scolding than this, and they're slightly worried.

"Not sure. I doubt they'd be stupid enough to go back to her place."

"Well, we won't worry about it right now." For someone who is the literal embodiment of Wrath, he keeps his cool pretty well. "I'll handle this on Monday. And then we'll take care of this once and for all."

"And then we'll be ready?" Envy asks. They try not to sound too over-eager; enthusiasm doesn't match with their façade very well.

"And then we'll be ready."

Envy runs their tongue along their teeth. "Excellent. Can't wait."

* * *

Winry is baking a pie when she hears frantic pounding on the door.

She likes baking to decompress; after a long week at school, it's nice to just follow directions and end up with something she can share with people. Ed made fun of her for her habit of baking in the middle of the night, but he always took the biggest piece of whatever it was she made.

Of course, even the de-stressing qualities of baking can't help the fact that someone banging on the door of your apartment late at night when your legal guardian is not home is slightly worrying.

Cautiously, she dusts her hands off on her apron and goes to peer through the peep-hole of the door. Upon seeing Riza and Mustang standing in the doorway, she yanks the door open with enough force that she hears the doorknob collide with the adjacent wall.

Her eyes immediately train on Mustang's hand, which is gripping his shoulder, unable to stop small rivulets of red from seeping up between his fingers.

"Is he--"

"Winry, I need you to close the door," Riza says, moving Mustang into the living room and setting him down as gently as possible on the couch.

"He's _bleeding_ ," Winry says, unable to stop thinking about how there will likely be a brownish stain on the couch tomorrow from Mustang's wound.

"The door, Winry," Riza commands, and she's never heard her voice like this before. This must be what Captain Hawkeye sounds like.

Winry does as she is asked and closes the door as gently as she can.

"What's going on?" she asks.

"You've had first aid training, right?"

She has, in fact. Her parents were doctors, and she often spent her summers volunteering at their clinic. But that doesn't answer Winry's question.

"Yeah, but--"

"Go get the first aid kit."

"Riza," Winry pleads. She knows that Riza has good reasons for keeping things from them, but that doesn't change the fact someone she knows is bleeding on her couch and she doesn't know why.

"Winry," Riza says, turning away from Mustang for the first time since they had shown up. "I'll explain everything once you get the first aid kit, okay?" And then, biting her lip, she amends: "I'll explain as much as I can."

Winry nods, walking into the bathroom she shares with Riza and digging around under the sink to find the first aid kit. When she gets back to the living room, Mustang's shirt is balled up on the floor, and Winry can see a large gash on his shoulder. She refrains from asking again what's happening, because it's futile. Riza will tell her as much as she thinks she needs to know.

"You clean his wounds and then I'll come back and dress them, okay?" Riza gets up and walks to her room, leaving Winry, Mustang, a first aid kit, and a lot of blood.

"Um," she says, unscrewing the cap of the antiseptic. "This is going to sting."

Somehow, despite a rather larger wound, Mustang smirks. "Yeah," he says, voice only slightly strained. "I figured."

For his part, though, Mustang is an exceptional patient. He never once flinches as she cleans the gash in his shoulder. Riza still hasn't come out of her room yet, which she finds suspicious, and so Winry looks up at Mustang and whispers "Will  _you_ tell me what's going on?"

"I don't think that's my place, Winry."

"Please? I mean, you did show up to my apartment covered in blood; I think you owe me an explanation."

He smiles and, looking not at her but slightly over his uninjured shoulder, says "She's trying to weasel information out of me, Captain. If she would stoop that low, I think you should just tell her."

Winry wasn't sure Riza had gone to her room to do, because she has returned to the living room empty handed. But, Winry notices, her eyes look a little puffy.

"How much should I tell her?" Riza asks. She looks and sounds exhausted.

Roy looks tired, but remarkably adamant as he says "As much as you can."

* * *

After being told as much as she could be told without endangering her own safety, Riza sends Winry to bed. It feels a little silly to tell a fifteen-year-old to go to bed, but it's getting late and she needs to talk to Roy alone.

When she's sure that Winry has closed the door, she looks up at Roy. "You can't go back there. To your apartment."

"Riza..."

"No, I'm serious. You're going to stay here. There's no way Envy could come here, there's always too many people, and we didn't tell Winry about them being a homunculus. They have nothing to gain from coming here."

"Aside from killing me, you mean."

"There's still too much collateral damage. For all intents and purposes, Winry and the Elrics have no idea what's going on. There'd be no reason for them to get involved."

"But what about you?"

Riza looks at the wound on his shoulder. The bullet may have only grazed him, but it still looks pretty nasty. "That's going to need stitches."

"Riza." He reaches out to grab her arm as she stands. 

"You know where I stand in this. I won't let you die."

"That job is getting pretty difficult, don't you think?" he says with a rueful smile.

She shakes off his hand. "Let me get some thread and a needle to close up your wound. And some vodka. You're going to want to be drunk for this."

* * *

 

Winry had let Riza send her to her room, less because she thought that was reasonable than that she could tell Riza and Mustang wanted to be alone. But just because she's in her room doesn't mean that she's stopped wondering exactly what happened. Riza told her that she couldn't know everything, that it would endanger her safety, and she had accepted that, but she still wants to know.

And so, when she was sure that they wouldn't be paying attention to her, she had gently eased the door of the room she shares with Riza open and peers out into the living room.

Mustang is leaning forward so that Riza can better access the wound on his shoulder, which she is stitching up with what looks to be a simple needle and thread. 

Winry has never been particularly squeamish. Having helped her parents out with their work as a kid had helped her get over any of that, and along with her work helping attach automail, this is nothing, but she's still impressed at how Mustang doesn't even wince as Riza threads the needle in and out of his flesh.

But, with him sitting at this angle, Winry notices something she's never seen before. Most of his back is taken up by a tattoo, done in red ink, of an arcane symbol that looks familiar but she can't place.

Riza finishes up the stitches and snips the thread, kneeling before him on the floor.

"How are you feeling?"

"I've been better." Her face is strained, and so he leans forward, placing a hand on her cheek. Winry fights the urge to close the door, because it now feels like she is looking at something private, something she shouldn't see. "Hey, I'm fine. You're the only reason I made it out of there alive. Thank you."

"I told you; I'm not going to let you die."

"Will you just let me thank you for once?"

"You'll need to stay here tonight," Riza says, completely ignoring what Mustang is saying.

Mustang laughs, a warm, dark sound that makes blood rise in Winry's cheeks, and moves his hand from Riza's cheek to the back of her neck. "I thought we already discussed this."

"We did. You can't stay in my room though, obviously, since I share it with Winry."

 _Wait,_ Winry thinks.  _They would share a room if she wasn't there?_

"I mean, I did already bleed all over your couch. I think that qualifies as claiming it."

Riza cracks the smallest of smiles. "I guess."

"Hey," he says, and she looks up at him. There are new lines around her eyes, lines that Winry is sure weren't there when she first moved in with her. "Everything is going to be fine. I promise."

Riza frowns. "Don't make promises you can't keep."

He leans down and places a kiss on Riza's mouth, causing Winry to suppress a gasp. There was no way. They joked all the time about Riza and Mustang being secretly involved with each other, but there was no way it was actually  _true_. And yet, here she was, watching the two of them kiss in her own apartment. For not the first time since living with Riza, Winry is keenly aware of all that happens when she isn't watching (or, when no one thinks she's watching). Winry, as quietly as she can, closes the door. This moment isn't for her.

Winry falls asleep long before she hears Riza come back to their room. 

* * *

On the list of things that Edward Elric expected to find in his kitchen on a dreary Monday morning, Roy Mustang is not even on the list. A brand-new PS4, a borzoi puppy, and a grant for chemistry research he never applied for would be more expected, in that at least he could be excited for those things. Roy Mustang is unexpected _and_ unwelcome.

"What are you doing in my apartment?"

Mustang is sitting at the kitchen table in a Central U shirt that's a little bit too snug on him, a very pleased-looking Black Hayate in his lap. "This isn't your apartment."

"That doesn't change the fact that I don't know why you're here," Ed says.

"There's coffee in the pot if you want to sit down and have a chat about it," Mustang says, raising his coffee cup--no,  _Riza's_ coffee cup, the one she always uses, with the anatomical diagram of a hawk on it that someone got her as a joke gift one year--and taking a sip.

"I don't want coffee, I want answers."

Mustang snickers. "Man, which crime procedural did you steal that one from?"

He's one snarky comment away from decking him, right there in the kitchen, when he hears Riza's voice from behind him, saying, gentle but firm, "Ed."

"Riza," he says, turning to look at her. "What's this jackass doing here?"

"He's going to be staying with us for a little while."

Ed balks. "What? Seriously?"

"Yes, and I would appreciate it if you two didn't try to kill each other. I don't want to clean up any more blood around here."

"Any _more_ blood?"

"Do you want coffee?" Mustang asks.

"Yes, please," Riza says, sitting down at the table, leaning heavily on the tabletop with her elbows. There are deep purple half-moons beneath her eyes, and her hair isn't its usual neat, honey-blonde. She looks half-dead. What happened last night?

Mustang gets up, grabbing Black Hayate into his arms as he stands, and handing the dog to Riza as he walks over to the counter where the coffee pot is. The creature whimpers in indignation at Mustang having put him down, and Riza laughs quietly, scratching him between the ears. "At least _someone_ is excited about our new houseguest."

Ed watches with a kind of wary curiosity as Mustang deftly navigates their kitchen, pulling another mug--a simple black one, the one that Riza uses whenever her favorite mug is dirty--from the cabinet and filling it with coffee before placing it in front of Riza. She smiles at him, a small, genuine smile, and says "Thank you," to which he responds with a matching smile and "No problem."

Ed realizes as Mustang shuffles back to the counter to refill his own mug and asks "Do you want coffee, Elric?" what precisely about the scene bothers him. It's _intimate_. Not in a sexual way, obviously, but there's something about this tableau that makes Ed feel like he's peeping in on someone else's home, on a married couple getting ready together in the morning, fixing each other's coffee before separating for the day. He's only ever seen Riza and Mustang interact on other people's terms before, in the car to and from HQ, or at work. The one time he had seen Mustang in their apartment before, he had immediately left upon Ed, Al, and Winry showing up. This is different, though. 

"I'm fine," and walks back to his room to change.

When Ed has disappeared, Roy turns to Riza and says "Maybe this wasn't the best idea."

"Ed can suck it up. Your safety is more important than whether or not he's mad at me." She takes a long drink of her coffee. "And besides, he doesn't hate you nearly as much as he wants you to think. The problem is, he's fifteen, and so showing genuine affection to anyone is terrifying."

"Unfortunately for him, that doesn't get much easier when you're older."

Black Hayate nudges her hand and she grins despite herself. "I don't know. I think I've gotten a little better at it. Also, I called you in sick."

Roy's dark eyebrows knit. "Wait, what?"

"You got shot last night; I think you deserve a sick day."

"How'd you explain that one? 'Yeah, sorry, I was at Roy's apartment where we were definitely not having sex, and where he got shot by a homunculus who also happens to be the General's intern. He won't be in today, but will be living incognito with me for the foreseeable future.'"

"Nope," she says, downing the rest of her coffee. "I told them that we went out drinking last night and that you got so drunk I didn't feel comfortable sending you home. I told them that you're too hungover to come into work today. I even got Havoc to corroborate so that it sounded less suspicious for the two of us to be going out alone."

"How'd you get him to agree to that?"

She shrugs. "He owes me a favor."

He's looking at her in the way he used to look at the Alchemists, like she's something full of immense, and slightly frightening power, something he can't fully control. "You're amazing."

"No I'm not," she says, scooting Black Hayate off of her lap and swinging down to give Roy a kiss on the corner of his mouth before going to her room to get ready for the day. "I just do what I have to do."

* * *

 The intern is notably absent, which has everyone but Riza in a fantastic mood.

"Off the script," Rebecca says, wasting time up in the observation deck with Riza. "I really, really don't like them. They rub me the wrong way for some reason."

"Wait, you too?" Breda asks, spinning around in his chair to look at the two of them. "I thought it was just me. Something about them just feels kind of..."

"Slimy?" Havoc offers. He's been smoking like a freight train all morning, as if he can feel the tension seeping off of Riza and is trying to calm it vicariously.

"Something like that," Rebecca says. She shivers. "I dunno, I just don't like them, and I know that's mean, because they're like, what, nineteen?"

"What, we're not allowed to dislike nineteen-year-olds now?" Breda asks.

"They're just a kid, is what I mean," Rebecca clarifies. "They probably don't know how weird they are."

"What do you think, Captain?" Havoc asks.

She's hesitant to answer. After all, her feelings toward the intern extend a lot further than mere dislike. She actively wishes they were dead, but knows that, unfortunately, that isn't possible. They have no way of knowing that, and she doesn't want them to get involved, and so she answers with a fairly equanimitous "They're not my favorite person."

"You all sound like you're being very productive," says Colonel Armstrong, appearing out of seemingly nowhere.

"Well, there's nothing to  _do_ ," Rebecca complains. "Mustang isn't here, Elric's running simulations, Armstrong's reading to some kids at a local elementary school or something. Even the intern isn't here. We're just sitting here with our thumbs up our asses, wasting all of Amestris's tax dollars."

"It doesn't matter whether the pilots are here or not," Olivier replies. "We have to be here regardless. We're the last thing separating humanity from complete destruction, and the Alchemists aren't the only way we do that." Riza isn't sure how many of them know that she's talking about Central-2. Because Olivier is right; it isn't just their job to fight homunculi, although Riza wonders whether or not that was ever really their job in the first place. It is just as much their job to make sure that Central-2 continues unmolested, so that if things go truly pear-shaped, as she is worried they may be going, they still have some bastion of humanity left. Although now she doubts the purpose of even that. Surely Central-2 must have some sort of sinister use as well, something she just doesn't know about. "But I'm not here to discuss the purpose of our organization with you. I'm here to get Captain Hawkeye." Riza looks up at Olivier, trying to glean some preemptive knowledge out of her. Olivier never comes to get her with good news. "The General wants to see you."

Riza feels her heart sink down into her ankles. "I see." She rises from her chair for what she hopes won't be the last time, and wonders about whether or not anyone she's with can see her knees shake. She doubts it. 

There is no lighthearted chitchat with Olivier today. Her hands are clasped behind her back as she walks, like she's a king surveying her kingdom from the battlements of her castle. She thinks about asking in a kind of code whether or not the General is calling her in to kill her, and if that's the case, if Olivier would carry a message to Ed and Roy for her, but she wonders about the extent of the knowledge that Olivier actually has. She's seemed to be about as far in the dark as Riza, so it would be useless and only arouse suspicion as to what she could have done to merit the General wanting to kill her in the first place.

When they get to the door of the war room, Olivier stops, heels of her shoes clicking crisply against the tile. "The General requested to speak with you alone."

"I understand," Riza says. She may be imagining it, but she thinks she may see a flicker of regret in Olivier's icy blue eyes. A bit of pity, perhaps. In all likelihood, Olivier has no idea why the General wants to speak with Riza, but it can't be for anything good. It never is. Olivier appraises her for a moment and stalks away, leaving Riza and the war room's closed door. 

Riza thinks, briefly, that she could just run. She could walk calmly out of the building, grabbing Ed on her way, and they could pick Alphonse and Winry up at school, swing by the apartment, pick up Roy and run. They could flee the country, go West to one of the countries not involved with the Human Instrumentality Project. But she knows that she can't. They would catch her before she got that far, and then what would all of her friends do? What about Rebecca, and Havoc, and Olivier? What would happen to them without her there?

And so she opens the door, because there is really nothing else for her to do, without knocking, and promptly closes it behind her. 

The General is sitting where he is always sitting, how he always sits, chin atop steepled fingers, face pleasantly impassive.

Once the door has closed, he looks up at her and says, calmly, "So I heard you shot my intern."

Riza continues to stand by the door, what feels like a safe enough distance away from him. "Did they also tell you about how they showed up at Mustang's apartment and tried to kill him? Or how they have the ability to shape-shift?"

The General cracks a smile and chuckles. "They  _did_ tell me that you were at Mustang's apartment, and that the two of you looked awfully cozy." An angry flush of color jumps to Riza's cheeks, and her heart begins to pound fearfully. Not this. Anything but this. "I'm sure you're aware of our fraternization policy. Sexual relationships between soldiers and their superior officers are strictly forbidden." She wants to bring up how Mustang and Hughes lived together, how Havoc has at least tried to sleep with basically every woman on staff, but knows that this isn't actually about her and Mustang's relationship. That's just a convenient excuse. "But, lucky for you, I like you, Captain Hawkeye." That's news to her. "You take good care of our pilots." He narrows an eye at her, glimmering wickedly. "Better care than I ever realized, in fact." Riza clenches her hand into a fist, relishing the feel of her nails biting into her flesh. She can take the comments about her and Mustang, because they're true. But him trying to imply that she just routinely fucks their pilots makes her blood boil. "And so I'll give you a choice."

"A choice," she echoes.

He nods. "Choice number one is I dishonorably discharge you here on the spot. You will be led out of this building immediately by security, your ID badge will be revoked, and you will never be able to access this building or any of our resources again. You will be evicted from your military-funded apartment, the Elrics will be removed from your care, and I will personally see to it that it is incredibly difficult to ever see that Roy Mustang of yours ever again."

What he is offering her is worse than death. If she were to get shot where she stood, that would honestly be preferable to what he suggests. Having everything she's worked for, everyone she loves, taken away from her, she doesn't think she'd be able to survive it.

"And choice number two?" she asks.

"Choice number two is you do me a small favor."

"And what would that be?" She's proud of her voice for not shaking.

"We are sending a team of researchers to do some work down in the bay of Aerugo. We've had some trouble in years past with researchers doing some unsanctioned study, and it's gotten us in a whole heap of trouble, and so we want to send you down with them to supervise."  _Unsanctioned research_. She thinks of Van Hohenheim, and his writing on the Alchemists, twenty years before they ever existed, and how he was wiped from history. Of course they want supervision. Why they want her to go, she who has already been noted as having insubordinate tendencies, she isn't sure. This all seems too easy a choice; dishonorable discharge or a simple trip to Aerugo? There has to be a catch. "You would be there for a month, leaving a week from today. If you do that, then I'll let your dalliances with Mustang continue. The choice is yours."

There is no choice. There never has been.

"I'll do it. I'll go to Aerugo."

He smiles. It seems that all he does is smile. It makes her skin crawl. "Good."

Leaving the war room, she has the almost insurmountable urge to throw up, right there in the hallway, but instead she tracks down Olivier.

Olivier looks startled to see her, as if she hadn't expected to see her again. Maybe she hadn't. "I'm leaving for the rest of the day," Riza tells her.

Remarkably, Olivier doesn't fight her about it.

She manages to find Ed, and tells him the same.

"Why?" he asks. "Is everything okay?"

Of course not, but she can't say that to him. "I'll be back to get you at the end of the day, okay?"  _Be careful_ , she thinks. Something distinctly not right is going on, and she's unsure as to what it is, but she doesn't want Ed to get involved. 

She drives definitely faster than is legal, but it's the middle of the day and no one's out. Honestly, she wouldn't care if there were.

Upon getting to her apartment, she closes the door behind her and presses her back against the wood, allowing it to steady her as her breathing levels out.

Roy had been on the couch, reading one of her books, but he looks up upon hearing the door close.

Riza looks at him. He seems to be in one piece, no visible wounds aside from the gash in his shoulder, which she can see the bandage for since he has decided to lounge around her living room without a shirt. She exhales shakily. She had been worrying in the back of her mind, behind all the other worries about getting gunned down in the war room or being dishonorably discharged or any number of other things she had to worry about, that since Envy hadn't been at work, they had come to her apartment in the day to kill Roy without her there to protect him. But he's still there, and no more worse for wear than he had been earlier that day. 

"Riza?" he asks, closing the book. "What are you doing here? Shouldn't you be at HQ?"

She walks over to where he is reclined on her couch and wraps her arms around him, feeling how his muscles lie beneath his skin, feeling the warmth that only comes from blood circulating through someone's veins, oxygenated by the breath that comes from steadily inflating and deflating lungs.   _Everything is fine_ , she forces herself to think.  _Everything is fine_. 

"What's wrong?" he asks, returning the embrace, arms significantly steadier than her own shaking limbs. "What happened?"

She tries to think of where to begin, which of her steadily mounting fears to address first, and so she settles on both the simplest and the most terrifying. "They know."

"About what?" he asks, pushing her far enough away to look at her face, hands on her shoulders. 

"About us. About Envy. Envy was almost certainly sent by Bradley to kill you, and they also probably know that you're here. They know everything, and Bradley tried to dishonorably discharge me, and--"

"Whoa, whoa, slow down for a second," he says. "What happened?"

And so she tells him, about how Olivier had brought her to the war room and Bradley had given her a choice so simple that it had to be a trap. 

"So they're sending you to Aerugo," he says flatly after she has finished laying it all out for him. She nods. "That doesn't sound too bad. I mean, sure, it'll be hot as hell down there, but--"

"It's not that they're sending me to Aerugo that's the issue here," she says. "It's that they're sending me away for a month."

He smirks. "Wow, who would have thought that Riza Hawkeye would be so needy? I know you'll miss me terribly, but a month isn't  _that_ long."

She slaps him gently. "That's not what I'm talking about. A month is a long time. I think they're planning something, something they don't want me here for. Maybe I should've just let him discharge me. At least then I'd  _be_ here."

"Yeah, you'd be here, but in what capacity? Even if you are in Aerugo when stuff goes down, you'd still have military clearance to find out about it. If you were a civilian, you'd be here, but your hands would be completely tied."

She frowns. "You're right, but I still don't like it. And what are they researching in Aerugo that's so secret that they want military personnel there to 'supervise'?"

"Well, I guess you'll find out. If nothing else, maybe you'll get some more information on the Human Instrumentality Project, because if I were to guess, whatever they're researching is involved with that."

That's a small comfort. She can't deny that she'd be more useful in Aerugo than she would be homeless in the middle of Central with no job, no connections, and no way to see any of her friends. But it still chafes at her. A month in Aerugo is a vacation to most Amestrians, or it had been a decade ago. She's been found to be fraternizing with her subordinate, as well as to have shot at an intern, and she's being offered an oceanfront suite on the Bay of Aerugo?

"You need to get out more anyway," Roy jokes, kneading at one of the many knots in her shoulders with his hands. "Relax a little."

As nice as that feels, she remains stiff as a board. "I can't relax."

* * *

Riza is the only person on her flight to Aerugo. This comes as no huge surprise. For a long while, Aerugo had flourished off of tourist _cenz_. It had been a prime honeymoon destination for a century, with young, wealthy, newlywed Amestrians going south to take in Aerugo's famous beaches and warm weather. They had food and wine and seawater, and it was generally regarded as a paradise compared to the forested, temperate climate of Amestris. But ever since the Greed attack, something odd happened, and it managed to siphon away most of Aerugo's funds.

The sea turned red, taking on both the look and metallic scent of blood. Most of the fish native to the oceans died, and Aerugo's other major source of economic support--the fishing industry--dwindled and eventually died. The tourists who had been flocking to their beaches now stayed as far away as feasibly possible, disgusted by the ocean's new, viscous texture, as well as convinced that the red waters were an ill omen. Riza can't really blame them there. She had never been particularly religious, but something about looking out over an ocean of what appears to be blood feels inauspicious and wrong. Flying low over the Bay of Aerugo, she feels like she's descending down into hell.

The flight hasn't been hugely long, but with no one else around her and nothing to do, she's had a lot of time to think. She realizes that she should probably be thinking strategy, logistics, how to communicate with everyone back in Amestris without incurring a massive international phone bill (maybe she can get the Program to cover it), but she can only think of mundane things. Well, not entirely mundane. It didn't feel mundane when she woke up next to Roy this morning. 

Winry knows about them. Riza isn't sure how she knows, but she knows. It's not massively surprising; Winry's a smart girl, and frighteningly perceptive, so if anyone was going to see through them, it stands to reason that it would be her. But the previous night, she had not-so-subtly shuffled everyone out of the apartment, with Ed grumbling the entire time about he didn't want to go stay with Paninya, because she always goes through his stuff when he's there. But as they had been walking out the door, Winry had stopped and looked her over. Riza thought that maybe Winry had grown a little, but thinks instead that it was the way she was standing, with her shoulders pushed back and her hips squared in line with her feet. 

"Please be careful in Aerugo, okay?" she asked, no frightened waver in her voice. 

"I'll try my best," Riza had said. 

Winry smiled. "Good. And I'll keep this one out of trouble, okay?" Winry winked over at Roy.

"Someone has to," Riza said, returning the smile. 

And then, in something that would haunt Riza the entire flight to Aerugo, Winry walked over and hugged her. She still isn't entirely used to physical affection, even with her affair with Roy, and it catches her off-guard. But even if she hasn't gotten any better at  _receiving_ physical affection, she might have gotten a little better at returning it, and she wraps her arms around Winry's surprisingly muscular little frame, one hand at the back of her golden head.

"I'll miss you," Winry said, voice muffled in Riza's shirt.

"I'll miss you too," Riza said, and meant it. She hadn't been away from any of the kids for longer than a night since they had gotten here, and more than having just gotten used to having them around, she loves them, simply, and they love her in return. To her it feels like an odd arrangement, this trade of affections, but when she had told Roy that, he simply looked at her, smiled, and said "That's equivalent exchange."

And so they had the apartment to themselves for the night. With the door closed behind Winry, Roy and Riza were silent for a moment, looking at each other with the kind of awkward anticipation of teenagers whose parents had left for the afternoon, leaving them alone in the house. After a few seconds' awkward silence, they both broke into giggles. 

Nothing particularly miraculous happened that night. They made dinner, and she let him rig up a movie that they didn't watch. There were no stark revelations, no mind-blowing sex. And yet, it felt particularly indulgent to play at mundanity like this, to pretend that they were like any other couple spending a quiet Sunday night in.

She hit the snooze twice on her alarm the next morning, and he laughed.

"I never thought I'd see the day when Riza Hawkeye would hit the snooze button," he joked.

"I don't want to leave," she complained, burrowing closer to him.

"I don't want you to either, but you have to. There's no other way." There is another way, but it's unthinkable, and so there's no reason to bring it up.

"I just know they're planning something for while I'm gone. I know it."

"Or maybe they really do just want you to supervise these researchers to make sure they're not filthy traitors like us." His smirk is a little forced, but Riza appreciates the lie. He knows just as well as she does that no one in Amestris works without an agenda.

"Just please be safe while I'm gone. Please."

"I'll try my best."

"I don't want you to try; I want you to promise."

"Fine," he said, smile softening, voice becoming solemn. "I promise."

As she left the apartment, he pressed a firm kiss to her mouth, and reached behind her, taking the clip out of her hair.

"You should wear your hair down more," he says, taking the clip and stowing it in his pocket. 

She glared at him, but is unable to put much malice behind the gesture. 

He locked the door behind her when she left. He didn't say goodbye.

She is greeted at the airport by the research team. They all have thick Aerugan accents, purring around their R's. 

"You must be Captain Hawkeye." The head researcher is a woman, very short, but standing with a presence that makes her seem taller.

"I am," Riza replies.

The airport is entirely empty aside from Riza and the researchers, and the effect is eerie as the sunlight streams through the windows, hitting empty chairs and casting shadows onto nothing.

"Good. Come with us, please." The woman seems to be all business, which is honestly Riza's preferred state of things. She isn't here to have a vacation. She wants to do her job and leave.

They promise that someone will claim her luggage for her, and so she follows the woman and her gaggle of large men, who could either be fellow researchers or bodyguards, Riza isn't sure, to a coffee shop a taxi ride away from the airport. The men follow in a different cab, and sit at a different table, but are still there, ever-present, as if waiting for Riza to pull a gun on the woman. Which, to be fair, if the stakes were a little lower, she might have actually considered it.

"So what is this research you're conducting?" Riza asks over a tiny cup of espresso.

The woman sips at hers demurely. "We're environmental scientists. We want to figure out what exactly has happened to the ocean, and what we can do to fix it."

"You don't know what's happened to the ocean?" Riza asks.

The woman smirks. "Aerugo is a very religious country. Many are convinced that the red sea is a sign of the end times, and so even scientists are wary to touch it." Riza understands that it seems ominous, but it's been eleven years since Greed attacked the Drachman ice caps. Eleven years is a long time to spend being scared of the ocean.

But Riza can't blame the Aerugans, honestly. For them it must have felt like the end of the world; their economy was collapsing, and their citizens were fleeing in huge droves to Amestris. Aerugo feels like a dying country. 

"And so what is it that you need me to do?"

"You are not a scientist. You're a soldier. You are here as no more than an emissary of Amestris. We don't expect you to actually participate in our research."

"I see."

The woman's sleek hair gleams like an oil slick in the sunlight. "Let's get you settled into the hotel, shall we?"

The hotel, much like everything else she has seen of Aerugo, is empty and haunted-feeling, like the buildings she remembered seeing dredged up from the sands of Ishval: clean and perfectly empty, as if everyone had decided together one day to up and leave. She wonders about the last time someone had used the room she's staying in. The woman gives her name--Martina--and a number, imploring her to call if she needs anything.

Left to her own devices, she calls in room service for dinner and reads one of the trashier books from her collection that she had brought with her, one designed to keep her brain just busy enough to be distracted. Around eight, not wooed by the concept of Aerugan hotel cable, she breaks down and calls Roy, halfway expecting to hear tell of destruction and death in her absence, but instead being informed of an entirely normal day. Al had gotten an A on an essay. Ed was a prick, as always (a sentence, Riza smiles to hear, that has a tinge of affection to it). Winry had made them all dinner. The only bump in the road had been that Ed was even surlier to him than he usually was, which Riza chalks up to Roy being in their space. Everything was fine.

She can only reasonably afford to stay on the line for an hour, and so, regrettably, she signs off for the night.

She's triple-checked the locks on the door and the window, although she really doubts they brought her out all this way just to kill her. After all, it's Roy they're after, and Bradley was right; she's too good at her job for them to off her.

The next morning, Martina is waiting for her in the hotel lobby, large men in tow, when Riza descends the stairs for breakfast.

"I hate to ask this of you on your first day," Martina says, with a deceptively conciliatory smile, "but would you mind to eat on the way? We've got a lot of work to do today." She is holding a small to-go coffee cup and a bag with something in it, like a carrot before a horse.

"That's no trouble at all," Riza says. She's never been a huge breakfast person, usually content with just a banana and some coffee, and she prefers her days to start early. If she can exhaust herself by the time she gets home for the night, she's much more likely to sleep.

It occurs to Riza as they arrive on the seashore of the Bay of Aerugo that this is the first time she's seen the ocean since the _Flamel_ sank. It's nothing like she remembers. In the perpetual night of wintertime in Drachma, the sea always looked like polished obsidian, flat and smooth and black, but here the sea is choppy and red, beating against the sandy shore like frothing blood.

Riza finds that Martina had been right, though; they really don't need her for anything. She watches for hours as they converse in rapid Aerugan, taking vials of seawater and sending them off somewhere, presumably to a lab. They take a lengthy break for lunch, and she is continually brought water by an unfortunate intern. The longer she's there, however, the more she becomes convinced that this was all a convenient diversion to get her out of the country and out of the Program's hair, because nothing even remotely shady seems to be going on. Despite her somewhat menacing demeanor, Martina appears to be a dedicated scientist, and orders about her underlings with the ruthless efficiency of a general. The first day comes and goes with little incident. She calls Roy upon returning to her hotel room, after dinner has been delivered to her, and all seems to be quiet on the home front. This is a small comfort.

The first week passes quicker than Riza thinks it should, and the second week much the same. At the end of the third week, however, Martina stops her as she's exiting her cab to return to the hotel. "Riza," she says, the R in her name rolled almost beyond comprehension. In Martina's mouth, her name sounds like some word she doesn't truly know the meaning of, some Aerugan idiom that can't be translated. "Do you have plans?" Like Riza would have plans in a foreign country where she knows no one. Martina smiles at that. "Good. I'll be back in a couple hours. Put on something nice if you brought it."

Riza is confused, but too wary of Martina's motives to object, and puts on the closest thing she can find to "nice" in her suitcase. She had heard that the heat of Aerugo was oppressive, and although no one's advice would ever truly explain quite how true that was, she had opted for as little clothing as possible, and finds a skirt and a blouse that she had brought in case she would have to perform any ambassadorial duties or the like.

True to her word, Martina arrives back at the hotel exactly two hours later. Riza only realizes that it's her when Martina flags her down. She has changed out of her lab coat, shorts, and t-shirt combo into a slim white dress and heels, hair pulled into a bun at the nape of her neck, and eyeshadow making her dark eyes shimmer. She looks like an entirely different person. The effect is somewhat uncanny.

Martina doesn't call them a cab, and instead begins walking.

"Where are we going, exactly?" Riza asks.

"Out for drinks, of course," Martina explains. "You can't simply come to Aerugo on business. I have to show you some of that hospitality we used to be so famous for."

They end up in a seedy restaurant bar that Riza thinks has always been seedy, and for once was not a victim of the economic collapse. There are people milling about drinking and conversing loudly, all in Aerugan.  _So this is a local place, then,_ Riza thinks.

They sit down and Martina orders drinks for them both. When they arrive, Riza takes a swig from hers to be greeted with the cool, piney taste of gin. She had always heard that Aerugans were wine fanatics, and so the choice strikes her as odd.

Martina asks her a slew of question, successive and relentless as gatling gun fire, each more banal than the next: What's there to do in Central City? (Everything.) What was her favorite film? (She didn't really like movies.) Did she have a boyfriend? (Sort of.) And then, as quickly as they had started, the questions stop, and Martina's shoulders droop as she heaves out a sigh.

"So I'm afraid that I lied to you, Riza. I didn't actually bring you here to show you Aerugan hospitality. This was, actually, for business." Why she bothered to get them all dressed up and fill her with alcohol makes this a little bizarre, but,  _Hey,_ Riza thinks _, When in Aerugo._ "Might I be frank?"

"Of course."

Martina looks around at their fellow drinkers and diners, and it all makes sense to Riza, suddenly, the questions, the fancy clothes, the local bar. She wanted to bring them somewhere no one would expect them to be talking about her research. She was babbling long enough to make sure no one was listening in on them. Her bodyguards, Riza notes, are nowhere to be seen.

"Your General is not a big fan of you."

Riza snickers. "You could say that."

"Well, he's no big fan of me, either, or my research team, for that matter. We've been trying to get clearance to test the Bay for years, but we've only been able to get funding a couple of months ago. Does that seem odd to you?"

Of course it does. A couple of months.  _He's been planning this_ , she thinks.  _He's been waiting around to get rid of me for months._

"Why are you bringing this up?"

"Because I think we may have something in common."

"And what would that be?"

"We both know some things about your government that they would prefer we didn't." Martina sighs again, taking a long drink from her gin and tonic before saying "Research is hell. Be eternally grateful that you didn't go into academia. Because, you see, on top of having our proposal ignored for years, we have no research that we can publish, because I don't want to disappear like Van Hohenheim."

Riza nearly spits out your drink. "Wait, you've heard of Van Hohenheim?"

"Of course I have. He's something of an urban legend in academic circles. He wrote some odd combination of science-fiction, grimoire, and engineering text, and he disappears mere years before all his seemingly wild speculation becomes a reality. Copies of his one published paper are exchanged at conferences all the time, sandwiched between other texts so that no one can see. Your government really is incredibly nosy."

Riza chuckles. "Yeah, you're telling me."

"But this stuff...it'd get me killed for sure."

Riza leans forward on her elbows. "What is it?"

The glint in Martina's eyes in the grimy candlelight of the bar is combative, but also a little bit frightened. She wonders if she's spoken what she's learned aloud to anyone else. "What's in the ocean isn't water."

This doesn't come as a huge surprise. It neither looks nor feels like water anymore, and nothing can live in it. "So what is it?"

Martina's voice is hushed as she says "I believe it is what your State Alchemist Program refers to as PSL."

Riza tries to find some ulterior motive under Martina's heavily made-up eyes. This, like everything else that has happened since she has gotten there, has seemed far too convenient. Is she a spy for Bradley, trying to wheedle information out of her? That would make the most sense. Why else would she bother to tell her this?

"Because," Martina says. "I need to tell someone."

They begin to meet like this most nights, so that Martina's research can at least reach someone if it can't be published. While Martina seems content to offer up most of her information, Riza keeps her cards as close to her chest as she can. This all seems to be a little too convenient, the General having practically set up two insubordinates to chitchat over drinks.

Eventually, Martina begins to bring documents with her, charts and graphs detailing the similarities between PSL and the substance in the ocean. While there are some small differences, the similarities are striking.

"But why?" Riza asks, midway through her final week in Aerugo. It seems both surreal to have home so close and to be leaving. She feels like she's been here forever, just another spirit in this country of ghosts.

"We aren't sure," Martina says. "I wish we had a better answer, honestly, but we don't, and we probably won't find any. Our funding runs out once you leave."

Riza laughs. "What a great supervisor I've been, letting you leak all of this information to the Amestrian government."

"Well, it has to go somewhere."

She refrains from mentioning any of this to Roy when they talk. While the danger of anyone tapping their phones learning of their affair is now a non-issue, they could still learn of other things, and she doesn't want to pull Martina into this unnecessarily. She'll tell him in the relative safety of her own apartment, where the only ears that will overhear them will be those of the Elrics and Winry. She would much rather explain this to them than to General Bradley.

She feels uncharacteristically optimistic as she stands on the seashore of the Bay of Aerugo, two days before she is scheduled to leave. The sun has beat a tan onto her normally fair skin, and while this hasn't exactly been a vacation, it has been nice to be away from the constant stress of Central.

A car skids onto the beach, someone anxiously tumbling out and running over to Martina, grabbing her frantically by the arm and rattling off a stream of terrified, rapid Aerugan. Even in the sun, and even with her olive skin, Riza watches as Martina's face pales.

She flags Riza over to where she is standing. 

"What is it?" Riza asks.

"I..." Martina stammers, dumbfounded. "We have just received word from your General. There is a homunculus attacking Central City, and he is demanding your return."

Riza tries not to panic. They've successfully fought off homunculi before, twice, in fact, in recent months, with little to no collateral damage: no civilian casualties, no loss of pilots. The closest they've come to that had been during a simple test, not during an actual sortie. And she doesn't want to chalk their success up to her involvement, because that'd be absurd, but at least she is able to help when she's there. She's in another country, and even if she left immediately, that doesn't give her much time.

"Come with me," Martina says, beginning to walk away from the shore toward the car that had shown up. "We're taking you to the airport and getting you on the next flight to Amestris."

"Amestris is accepting flights in the middle of a homunculus attack?"

Martina's face is drawn. "They are for you."

They shuttle her onto a puddle jumper and get her into the air remarkably fast, but that does nothing for the fact that she still has to get from Aerugo to Amestris, and time is a rare commodity right now. Every minute counts when homunculi are involved. 

She realizes that something is wrong, drastically wrong, as they approach the city and the clouds begin to go from puffy and white to thin and black. She thinks that they might be flying into a storm system, until they crest the city limits and she realizes that it wasn't clouds at all. It was smoke.

Riza presses her face against the thin plastic window next to her seat, horrified to see that, somehow, even in the minuscule amount of time it has taken her to get here from Aerugo, Central has been nearly decimated. Buildings she recognizes from the skyline are broken in half, lying in mismatched pieces on the ground, and it seems like everything is on fire. She sees no sign of homunculi or Alchemists, though, just desolation. 

When she lands, Edward and Rebecca are waiting for her at the airport. Edward is still in his plug suit. Rebecca is standing off near a window, staring out over the rubble that used to be Central's old town. So much history lost. 

"Edward," Riza says. "Take me to HQ, let's go."

"That won't be necessary," he says quietly. His cheeks look blotchy, like maybe he's been crying. Riza's heart begins to pound.

"Why won't it? We need to defeat the homunculus. I need to direct the Alchemists."

"We've already defeated it," Ed says. "Well, Mustang did it. He defeated the homunculus."

Riza searches his face, trying to find whatever it is that he isn't saying. "Where is Mustang?" Ed's fists clench at his side, and he looks down at his feet. It feels as if all the blood is draining from Riza's face, down through her arms and pooling in her feet. "Ed? Where is Mustang?"

"He's dead."

Ed may as well have been saying gibberish, because his statement carries no meaning. "What did you say?"

"I said that he's dead, Riza." He looks up at her finally, gold eyes brimming with angry tears. "He defeated the homunculus, but it killed him. He's dead."

"No he's not," Riza says blindly, reaching out to grab Ed by the shoulders. She feels herself growing hysterical. "He's not dead. He can't be, he  _promised me_."

"Riza," Rebecca cautions, walking over to her, placing a gentle hand on her shoulder that Riza reaches up to slap away.

" _He's not dead_ ," Riza spits at her.

"I..." Rebecca has never looked at her, or anyone, as far as could think of, with pity, and she finds herself sickened by it. 

"He's not dead," she repeats, voice growing small, her knees buckling beneath her. "He promised."

There is still another week before the end of the world, but for Riza Hawkeye, the world ends that afternoon, in Central City's airport, watching Edward's tears roll off of his cheeks and collide with the tile floor.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is from "On a Good Day," by Joanna Newsom.
> 
> Also, the record Roy plays for Riza in this chapter is Sufjan Stevens's album "Carrie and Lowell," which is my album of the year, and I'm really milking this modern AU for all that it's worth.
> 
> Also also, as you might have noticed, there is now a finite number of chapters for this fic: we are now on Chapter 18 of 20, so we're in the home stretch. Get comfy everybody, because it's gonna be a wild ride from here on out.
> 
> Also also also, my sincerest apologies for this chapter taking so long. I had finals, and then I went home for Christmas, and also this chapter was just really hard to write.


	19. "I tried my best, I tried in vain."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome everybody to the End of OEHODK-gelion. Shit's gonna get real weird and abstract from here on out, but we're almost done! Soon you will be free from my questionable characterization choices, pretentious music taste, and insistence upon making every character I love cry!
> 
> This is the final two-parter of the fic! Chapter title is from Sufjan Stevens's "All Delighted People."

Gracia no longer feels safe in her own city, and not for any of the reasons her parents had told her about before she moved there.

Her family had lived in West for as long as anyone can remember, and so they weren't too keen on her moving to Central for college, even if it did have the best university in the country. West was small and sleepy compared to Central, and her family was convinced that Central ran rampant with crime and drugs, and maybe it did, but she can't really be sure. She and Maes always kept to themselves, sticking to the more well-lit parts of the city, on the outskirts, where things were just as quiet and well-intentioned as they were back in West. She loved Central from the first moment she saw its skyline cresting over the horizon from the window of her train, and so she took offense to her parents always begging her to move back, particularly once Elicia was born.

"Central is no place to raise a child," her mother had sworn to her, but she always had the proof of excellent schools, beautiful museums, good food, and a diverse group of kids for Elicia to make friends with. This never really convinced her, but it did shut her up for a while.

And so she feels like a traitor now, driving through the remains of Central City,  _her_ city, and thinking about the logistics of leaving. She feels as though she's proved her mother right after all these years, but for no reasons that she could have possibly anticipated. No one could have anticipated this.

Elicia is too young to really understand what is going on, and so she chatters from her car-seat in the back of Gracia's SUV brightly about getting to see Aunt Riza, although she had told her before they had left their town-house that Aunt Riza wasn't feeling well. That is the closest she can come to describing what Riza is going through to a three-year-old, even a three-year-old who had witnessed the effect of her father's death on her mother. She and Riza have always been very different women, and so it only makes sense that they would handle the death of a loved one differently, even if she isn't entirely sure that it's alright to equate her losing Maes with Riza losing Roy. As she pulls into the parking lot of Riza's apartment building, miraculously unharmed by the previous week's homunculus attack despite being so close to the city center, Gracia knows that she can. Whether either of them knew it or not, it was the same.

Elicia likes elevators. Living in their two-story town-home, she doesn't get to experience them very much, and so whizzing up to Riza's apartment has her bouncing excitedly on the balls of her feet, talking about how high up they are. Gracia does her best to humor her, and thinks that she does a pretty good job. Ever since Maes died, she's gotten very good at putting on a happy face for those who need to see it.

When she knocks on the door of Riza's apartment, it is Rebecca Catalina who answers. She looks tired, her usually luxurious hair pulled high on her head in a ponytail to keep it out of her face. She is unusually devoid of makeup, and looks like she hasn't gotten a full night's sleep in days, which Gracia guesses is because she hasn't.

"Hi, Rebecca," Gracia says gently. She wishes now that she had brought a pie, or cookies, or something. That's what you do when people die in West; you bring food, because those who are still alive need to keep on living. Sweet things remind people to stick around, to keep their feet firmly planted on the earth and not to wander towards the grave.

"Hi, Gracia," Rebecca says, returning a smile that is drawn but grateful. She crouches on the floor to be eye-level with Elicia. "And hello there, little miss. I haven't seen you since you were  _this high_." She holds a hand maybe a foot off the ground, which causes Elicia to break into a fit of giggles.

"I was never  _that_ small," Elicia protests.

"Oh yes you were," Rebecca says, and then stands. "Well, come on in."

The blinds on all the windows are closed, making the whole apartment feel close and claustrophobic. Stagnant. Tomb-like.

"Where is Riza?" Gracia asks, looking around. There is no one milling about the living room or the kitchen, which is unusual for an apartment holding so many people with such strong personalities.

Rebecca's mouth compresses itself into a single straight line. She walks over to one of the two bedrooms and knocks quietly on the door. It isn't Riza that comes out, however, and Gracia finds herself looking at Winry Rockbell.

"Hey, Elicia, look who it is!" Rebecca says with a fairly impressive facsimile of excitement. Elicia doesn't notice how forced it is, clutching her tiny hands gleefully to her chest.

"Winry!"

"Hi, jellybean," Winry says, smile warm but eyes tired. "Do you wanna come play with me and Ed and Al? Mommy needs to talk to Rebecca for a little bit."

"Where's Aunt Riza?" she asks.

Her smile falters slightly. "She's sleeping right now. Maybe you can see her later, okay? Come on." She reaches a hand down to Elicia, who regards it for a moment, deliberating, before taking it. "Let's go play with Edward and Alphonse." As Winry and Elicia disappear into the room she had walked out of, Winry casts a look back at Gracia, and then closes the door behind her.

"How is she?" Gracia asks.

Rebecca sighs. "She hasn't said a word since she found out about Roy. She's just laid in bed. It's been hell trying to make sure she eats. It's like she's dead." Rebecca makes an annoyed growling sound in the back of her throat. "I swear to God, I'm never gonna forgive that bastard for dying and fucking her up like this. Never. I would spit on his grave, but he got cremated, so there's nothing to spit on."

Gracia knows that Rebecca never liked Roy to begin with, but this kind of visceral anger surprises her. People grieve in odd ways. She knows this, but she also knows that Rebecca isn't grieving for Roy. She's grieving for Riza.

"Can I see her?" Gracia asks.

Rebecca shrugs, her shoulders heavy. "If you want. She won't talk to anyone, not even the kids, but you can try. Maybe she'll talk to you since, you know..." Rebecca's sentence trails off in embarrassment, but Gracia smiles.

"Since I know what it's like," she finishes. "To lose somebody."

"Yeah," Rebecca says quietly.

"Whether she'll respond to me or not, I need to talk to her. If Roy isn't here for me to tell this to, she's the next best thing."

"I hate this," Rebecca says, and Gracia isn't sure if that's really directed at her or not. She wonders if she's gotten to say that to anyone since Roy died.

"We all do."

Rebecca directs her toward Riza's room, and Gracia places a few tentative knocks on the door, not because she thinks Riza will respond, but because she still respects Riza enough to honor her privacy. She doesn't open the door, but Gracia doesn't expect her to.

Riza's room is as dark and closed-off as the rest of the apartment, but with a musty, close smell that reminds Gracia of an antiques shop. Of death.

"Hi, Riza," she says, closing the door behind her, shutting out all the artificial light from the living room. Riza doesn't answer her, but, then again, she wasn't expecting her to.

This Riza looks nothing like the Riza Gracia knows, with her straight back and stiff shoulders, her steady hands and keen eyes. She's curled into a ball in the corner of her bed, hardly taking up any space at all, buried under blankets to the point of being unrecognizable. She understands Rebecca's anger now; Roy's death has drained all the life from her.

"I came here to tell you something," Gracia says, and waits for a moment, even though she knows that Riza won't answer her. "When you were away, Roy came by to see Elicia and me. He had been doing that for a while after Maes died, checking up on me. But while you were gone, he asked me and Elicia to leave Central. He said that he was worried that something was going to happen while you were out of the country. He wanted us to get out before whatever it was happened."

He looks at Riza's stationary form, wondering if maybe she's asleep. She isn't moving, not even registering that Gracia is there.

"I didn't want to leave. Elicia is so young, and I have the flower shop. All my friends are here. And I like this city. It means a lot to me." She thinks that, from this far up, Riza would have an excellent view from her bedroom window, but the blinds are down and Gracia can't see out of them. "The only trouble is, I'm worried that there won't be much of a city for me to care about for much longer. After that attack last week..." She doesn't need to say what, exactly, happened after the attack last week. Riza knows. From the looks of it, Riza knows all too keenly. "The city doesn't feel safe anymore. The way Maes talked, it was like he always thought that everybody at the State Alchemist Program really could protect us, and they did, for a while." The most recent attack had been the first on Amestrian soil that resulted in any deaths since the Gluttony attacks. It had seemed that, for a while, maybe this problem had been managed. "But now, I think it's time for us to leave. Before this gets any worse." Because it will get worse. Gracia can feel it, in the same way animals can sense rain before it hits. This city is doomed. The rest of the world is probably doomed, too, but maybe she can buy Elicia some time by getting out now. 

Riza continues to just lie there, corpse-like, unmoving. Gracia knows that she's alive; from under her shroud of blankets, Gracia can see Riza's chest continually rising and falling, entirely unaware of its host and how little she seems to care whether she breathes or not.

"I'm not entirely sure why I felt the need to come tell you this," Gracia confesses to Riza's enervated form. "I suppose, without Roy here, you're the closest thing I've got." She had hoped that invoking Roy would get some reaction out of her, but it doesn't. She hadn't actually expected it to work, but figured that she'd at least try.

She watches Riza breathe for a moment, but eventually accepts that no amount of time spent sitting with her will convince her that life is worth living even with the new absence inhabiting it. That's something you have to learn on your own. Gracia did. She had to.

Gracia stands, brushing a few wrinkles from her skirt. "Well, I'll be going. Elicia and I have a lot of packing to do." She wonders if she'll ever get to see Riza Hawkeye again, wonders how much longer there will be a Central City and people in it to worry about. But there's no point in having a tearful goodbye with Riza. Gracia may be leaving town soon, but Riza has already left.

* * *

Sometimes Wrath thinks that he should have been Pride instead, because as the monochrome faces of FATHER phase into view, he feels nothing but pure satisfaction with himself.

"Are we ready?" the delegate from Drachma asks, ever businesslike.

"After last week's sortie with Greed," Wrath says, allowing himself the indulgence of a smile, "we are."

"When shall instrumentality commence?" asks the delegate from Creta.

"Soon," Wrath says. "Very soon."

"We may be rid of Mustang," begins the delegate from Xing, "but what about Captain Hawkeye? Can she be trusted?"

There is a flurry of murmured agreement and head-nodding from the other representatives, but Wrath stops them. "Whether she can be trusted or not is irrelevant. She hasn't been in since Mustang's death. From our surveillance, she hasn't left her apartment either. She's powerless."

"Good," replies the delegate from Xing.

"Gentlemen," Wrath says, standing. "I hate to cut our meeting short, but I have a plane to catch. Are there any further questions?"

When none present themselves, Wrath smiles, watching as the faces of the FATHER representatives vanish and the lights come back up in the war room. 

Yes, he is proud. He has succeeded where every other homunculus had failed before him: in getting rid of Roy Mustang. He had been like a cockroach under the feet of FATHER for years, simultaneously insignificant and impossible to kill, and no large show of firepower (he chuckles a bit at his own clever wordplay) or artillery would get rid of him. And yet, somehow, no one had ever considered the simplest possible solution: getting rid of the thing keeping him safe, in the basest of terms. Without Hawkeye to protect him, Mustang was defenseless and unsettled, just as he had anticipated. And sure, he had gotten rid of Greed prior to finally dying himself, but that was fine. Wrath had never particularly liked Greed anyway. The easiest way to kill humans was not with weaponry, but with love. It will be their downfall, each and every time.

Envy is waiting for him outside of the war room, leaning against a wall and looking thoroughly bored. They should be jubilant; Human Instrumentality will be underway soon, and then they'll all practically be gods, even Envy, which is a frightening thought, to be honest.

"That was quick," they note, looking up at him.

"I need to be at the airport," Wrath replies, not overeager to explain his plans to Envy. 

They smirk, giggling under their breath. "Oh, so you're gonna take that human pet of yours and Pride and fuck off somewhere you won't be caught in the transmutation? How sweet. You don't want Mrs. Bradley to be a part of our philosopher's stone?"

He wants to kill Envy then, both for speaking about Mrs. Bradley like they understand anything about their arrangement, and for speaking of the Human Instrumentality Project so candidly in public where one of the Program flunkies could overhear.

"Don't speak about things you don't understand."

"Oh, I think I understand perfectly. You've been living around these flesh-bags for too long and you've gone native. It seems a little hypocritical, don't you think? You get to play house while everyone in this country is gonna get liquefied so that you can rebuild everything in your own image."

"Why, Envy, I thought you wanted to participate in that rebuilding." 

"Oh, I don't really care one way or another. I just think you're fucking weird, is all."

Wrath doesn't love Pride or Mrs. Bradley, not really. Love is an emotion of weakness, a purely human failing, something built into their souls that makes them fundamentally lesser than homunculi. Mrs. Bradley is useful, and maybe, just maybe, he's grown a little fond of her. He doesn't love her, though; he can't.

"Well, unless you want to get 'liquefied,' as you so eloquently put it, you'll want to get out as well, Envy."

Envy yawns, stretching. "Yeah, yeah, I'm just taking my time." Popping a kink in their neck, they add "Besides, after this I've got the rest of eternity. Why rush?"

* * *

The end of the world comes in the morning, in the time in between night and day, before the sun has truly stolen over the horizon. The sky is a luminescent blue, glowing in anticipation of sunrise, but a different lights gets there first. A flock of nightjars roosting atop a tall, concrete apartment building, Riza Hawkeye's apartment building, startled by the light and by the screeching sound accompanying it, fly away. The light isn't coming for them, after all.

No one in Riza's apartment is awake, save for her, although waking and sleep only feel slightly different with your eyes and blinds closed. She hears it coming before she sees it. She can see a faint flash of red through her eyelids, and then she is gone.

* * *

Her first thought upon opening her eyes and seeing only blackness is that she's died. At first she's grateful, and then angry. She had thought death would just be oblivion, the consciousness belonging to her gone, but instead she's still there, technically, looking out across the void. She lifts an arm, looks at it, and sees that her body still appears to be there, clad in the same thing she'd been wearing for what feels like years, but in reality has only been a week. _This is bullshit_ , she thinks. This is an even rawer deal than what she had expected from death. 

She turns her head, looking around, but there is only more blackness in every direction, with no sign of walls, ceiling, or floor, even though she is standing on something, but that something is indistinguishable from everything else she sees.

She inspects the place where her feet connect with what she supposes is a floor, and when she looks up she jumps, an involuntary reaction that spurs more energy from her than her body has expressed in days, because she's looking at herself form across the void, only different. The her standing in front of her is wearing a parka, fur collar arranged about her neck like a Renaissance dress collar, its shiny, wind-resistant fabric extending down to her feet. She is looking at Riza with inscrutable eyes, but is smiling softly. Something in Riza's bones ( _Does she still have bones?_ ) vibrates in recognition, but her mind hasn't caught up to them yet. All she knows is that she wants to rush this figure and bury her face in that fur collar.

"Riza," the figure says, and she realizes why she had reacted so viscerally, hearing a voice a little deeper and darker than her own, one she hasn't heard in over a decade. "Look how much you've grown."

Riza's voice grates out of her throat like a rusty knife out of its sheath, dull from disuse. "Mother?"

The woman's smile reaches her eyes, causing them to wrinkle in the corners like papers curling in a fire. "Your hair has gotten so long."

She has to be dead, because that is the only way this could be explained. Her mother has been dead for fifteen years, and now that she's died too, they can be reunited. How poetic.

"I..." Riza, despite not being particularly religious, has contemplated this moment for years. On the off-chance there was an afterlife, what would she even say to her mother? She's become more of an absence than she was ever an actual person to her. She's been gone from Riza's life longer than she was ever there.

It occurs to Riza suddenly that this is the exact outfit her mother had been wearing that day on the _Flamel._ She's in the clothes she died in, just like Riza.

"I've heard quite a lot about you," her mother says, "from the others."

"The others?"

"You've grown to be quite the young woman. A captain at your age...that's impressive."

There is no way that her mother would ever really praise her like this unless they were dead. She was just as reticent in her affections as her father was, although a little less cold. She never would have spoken this freely to her when she was alive.

"I do wish that you hadn't have gone to the State Alchemist Program, however. Your father would be rolling in his grave if he knew."

"Father? Is he here?"

She continues to avoid Riza's questions, but her smile deepens, and Riza finds it hard to care that information is being withheld from her. Her head feels effervescent, her thoughts sliding around her mind like skaters on an ice rink.

"You've been so strong," her mother says, eyes twinkling in a way that Riza doesn't remember ever seeing them. She remembers her mother being a dry-eyed woman, with a mouth like hers, but thinner, from years of frowning. 

"No I haven't," Riza protests. She thinks of winding up on Mustang's couch after drinking too much, of weeping over his entry plug, of her body, curled up still in her bed, finally having given up, apparently. She's been incredibly weak.

"That's not what I heard," her mother says. "You stood up when you saw injustice. You protected people you loved. You worked your way up through an organization that was actively working against you. And now you can rest."

Her mother is right. Even if she hasn't always been strong, she's been working incredibly hard for one thing or another her entire life. All her anxiety, her fears, her sadness, it's all gone, and in its absence, Riza struggles to recall them ever existing to begin with.

"I'm so proud of you," her mother says, enunciating a series of syllables she's never heard before, not from anyone, not her parents, her teachers, her superiors, her friends. She never knew how much she needed to hear those five words, because they cut into her gut like a knife wound, but instead of blood spilling out, she feels hot tears welling from behind her eyes. She feels like a child again, and every feeling she has ever had is eclipsed by unbelievable, unbearable  _relief_. "Come here," her mother says, opening her parka-clad arms, just wide enough for Riza's body to fit between them. "My little hawk," she says, voice practically dripping with maternal concern, and Riza's tears spill over onto her cheeks. She had heard the nickname only a handful of times as a child, in the rare moments when her mother's decorous demeanor would slip, and she had forgotten about it. It pierces at the fleshy bits of her heart, the places that never quite hardened with age or experience or fear. 

She walks toward her mother, feet somehow finding purchase despite the lack of ground, reaching for her and closing her eyes against the salt stinging them, and waits for the feeling of her mother's arms around her, something she never thought she'd feel again, and never thought she wanted.

But she doesn't feel that. Instead, she feels a hand on her shoulder. She turns around and sees Roy, in his plug suit, looking worried.  _Ah yes,_ she thinks, eyes drinking in his face hungrily.  _This is what I've been waiting for_. She only thought about seeing him in death the same way she thought about seeing her mother, but she had always hoped, quietly, in the back of her mind, in the hazy moments between waking and sleep. She had hoped that she had lived a life at least virtuous enough to deserve this.

"Don't," Roy says, looking over her shoulder at her mother.

"What? Why? She's my--" She cuts herself off, looking toward her mother for some recognition, but she's gone, nothing but blackness where she had been standing. "Where did she go?"

"She's been here too long. She doesn't remember who she is anymore."

"What are you talking about? Aren't I dead?" That's the only way any of this could make sense. How else could she see her mother? Or Roy?

"Sort of," he says. "Just please, be careful. The longer people have been here, the more their sense of individuality has dwindled, and the more they want to integrate you."

"Integrate?"

He nods. "Everyone's souls are being amalgamated."

"What are you talking about?" she asks, voice beginning to regain some its old desperation.

"Riza, we're inside of a philosopher's stone."

"So they did it, then," she says, accepting this fact more readily than she would have anticipated. "FATHER. Human Instrumentality went through."

He nods again, taking his hand off of her shoulder. "They've been working at this for years. Anyone who has ever been killed by a homunculus, or whose soul was taken during the transmutation of the philosopher's stone, their soul is here."

"So I'm dead?" she asks again.

"Not entirely," he replies.

"Goddammit," she curses, hands curling into fists at her sides.

"What are you cursing at? I would think you would be thrilled. You aren't dead!" he says, gesturing at her with open palms, as if this were a cause of celebration.

"But I was ready," she says, throat tight. "I was done. Everything had fallen apart. The world didn't need me anymore."

He grasps her face in his hands, and yes, this can be no hallucination, because she can feel every callus of his hands from grasping at the controls of the Flame Alchemist. His hands are slightly cold, as they always were. His circulation was poor from all the smoking, and he had fingers like ice cubes. She used to hold one of his hands between both of hers, willing blood to warm them up again.

"Don't you say that," he says, moving his face close enough to hers that their eyelashes almost brush against each other. "Don't you  _dare_. Of  _course_ the world needs you."

"But I failed," she says. "Obviously. Look at us: we're stuck inside a stone because I failed. Everything is over. And you're gone--"

"That doesn't matter," he says, placing his forehead against hers, as if trying to will his thoughts into her head. "The world needs you. You've been holding the world up practically singlehandedly for so long. You held me up."

"But I can't anymore," she says, voice small. "I just can't."

"Yes you can," he swears. "I know you can. And you'll get out of this, and you'll fix everything. I know you will."

She reaches up, grasping his wrists with her hands. "I'm not leaving without you."

He leans back, looking her in the eye. "You have to. I can't go with you, Riza. I'm really dead."

"I don't care," she says. "I'll drag you out of here myself, or I'm not going."

"Fine," he says, but she isn't sure whether he's agreeing with her or not. "Fine."

* * *

Ed doesn't dream lucidly. In fact, he hardly dreams at all. Even when they were children, Al would wake up wailing in the night from frequent nightmares, running to their mother, while Ed slept peacefully, inert as the dead. His mother always found it odd, when she and Al would spend their breakfasts detailing the dreams they had had the previous night, and Ed would listen, perplexed, that for a boy with such a busy, whirring mind, it always seemed to quiet down when he was sleeping.

"You must just exhaust it during the day," she would say to him, but Ed was always slightly jealous of his brother's nightly adventures, although they were rarely more extravagant than their daily lives. He was even slightly jealous of the nightmares.

And so he finds it odd that when he comes to, he knows immediately that he's dreaming, because he is staring up into his mother's face, smiling down at him, ponytail dangling over her shoulder.

"Hi, Ed," she says, voice warm and sonorous, like the inside of a viola. 

"Mom?" he asks, sitting up. 

"It's been a while," she says, crouching down to sit next to him. "You've grown so much!"

"Don't make fun of me," he says, crossing his arms over his chest. 

"Oh, I'm not! You really have grown. And your hair has gotten longer, too. You look just like your father."

Ed sticks out his tongue, which he only realizes is silly and childish after the fact. He can't exactly curse out his mom for comparing him to Hohenheim, even if she is a dream. He wouldn't want to.

"Sorry, sorry, you probably don't want to hear that." His hair is still down from when he had fallen asleep, oddly enough, and she brushes his bangs out of his face. "I heard you've been very busy lately."

"From who?" He can't see anyone else around them, just black. Maybe she was right; maybe his brain  _was_ too tired from the day to think much up for dreams if this is all it can come up with.

"Roy Mustang," she says experimentally, as if she were unsure about pronouncing his name. "He's been keeping me company for a little while."

"Wait, Mustang is here?" That doesn't make any sense. Sure, of course he would want to dream about his mother. She's been dead for years, and he misses her every day. But Mustang?

Even in his thoughts, it's difficult to keep up his old bravado. He misses Mustang, even if he was a prick when he was alive. He sacrificed himself to save Edward's life from Greed, and he'll never be able to repay him for it, the asshole. Ed hadn't been able to watch it while it happened, but he knows now in Mustang's absence that he had been helping hold Riza up, and with him gone she's toppled like a house of cards.

Ed's mother nods. "He's a very handsome young man, although those plug suits of yours really are silly looking. You should talk to someone about those."

"Their design is conducive to linking the neural pathways of the pilots and the Alchemists, and the colors of the fibers are actually chosen specifically for--" His mother chuckles and he stops. "What?"

"You sound just like your father, too."

He doesn't feel like acknowledging that right now, and so instead he asks "So if Mustang's here, where is he, anyway?"

His mother places a finger to her chin, contemplating, and says "Oh, I would wager he's probably with that Riza I've heard so much about."

"Riza's here too?" Ed asks, baffled. He doesn't dream for months, and the first dream he has is both incredibly crowded and unbelievably empty. It doesn't make any sense. He knows that, scientifically, dreams are just recycled information that our brains are attempting to process, but he still tries to piece some meaning together from this. His mother, Mustang, and Riza walk into his dream...What punchline could that possibly render?

His mother's smile flattens. "Al is here, too. And Winry, and a lot of people that I don't know but who know you. And they love you, all of them." She smiles again, but it's strained this time. "And I'm so glad about that."

"What's going on, Mom?" This doesn't feel like any dream he's ever had. 

She places a hand against his cheek. "I'm afraid this isn't a dream, sweetheart."

"Then what is it?"

"We're inside of a philosopher's stone."

"What?" He knows about philosopher's stones. He'd read up all about them in one feverish summer, about how they could allow one to have the powers of a god, but only at the expense of human lives. The only way to shake off your humanity was at the expense of others'. 

"I don't know all the details myself," his mother says, dropping her hand. "But Roy knows quite a lot about it, more than anyone else I've encountered since I've been here."

"How long have you been here?" Ed asks, voice shaky.

His mother's eyes are shiny, like glass beads on a string. "Since I died."

 _This isn't a dream_. He knows it with the same ineffable knowledge that he knows when he is awake. This isn't a dream, but it isn't quite reality, either. He isn't sure how, but he knows that this is real, and he knows that his mother is telling him the truth.

"I...but why?"

She shrugs. "I can't really say, Ed. This is the way the world has always been, though. Since the birth of the world, people have always tried to get things they can't and shouldn't have, and they've done terrible things to get it. I'm just sorry that you had to get caught up in it. You and Al deserved better."

"I hate this," Ed says, bitterness and anger and resignation all warring in the pit of his stomach, ultimately neutralizing each other. "I hate that the world we're in allows these things to happen." Occasionally it feels as if the deck has been stacked against him from the start, as if whoever was casting his and Al's lots were using loaded dice. Maybe it was something in the way the Earth's axis was tilted, in its position relative to other heavenly bodies. He was cursed, and it was the world's fault.

"What kind of world would you like to see?"

Ed always gets compared to his father, but when he looks into her mother's eyes and sees them bright and sparkling and intelligent, he sees himself in her. That look isn't Hohenheim; it's 100% Trisha Elric. 

"What?"

"You know, I have a theory. We're all powering the greatest battery that the world has ever seen, more or less, the kind of thing that can, and probably will, change the face of reality. But the people who will be using it, using us, are outside. Why can't we do anything from in here?"

Ed blinks. "I...uh...I don't know. There's no real science about this kind of thing. People stopped looking into it in the seventeenth century."

"My theory," she continues, "is that maybe we _could_ do something. Change things. Well, not _we_. I can't do anything. I've been in here for too long. That's how they get you; death is still death, even in a philosopher's stone. The longer you're dead, the thinner your tie is with yourself, with the outside world. I've been dead too long. But you, you just got here. Your tie to life is still strong; you still remember what it's like to be alive. You still remember the world in enough detail," she says, the blue of her eyes bright and almost luminescent, "that I bet you could remake it if you wanted to."

"What? How?"

"Just think, Ed," she says, and Ed wonders at this being the first time he's seen her in years. She's so much more vibrant than his memories, all faded and wrinkled with time. This was the woman who raised them, an equal to his father, a woman strong enough to raise them in his stead. "You are part of the greatest power to ever exist. And so," she places a hand on either of his shoulder, firm but gentle, like she used to do when trying to communicate something very important. "What kind of world do you want to see?"


	20. "Oh, but the world is a mess!"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright, everybody, here it is, the final chapter of OEHODK! Thank you to everyone who has stuck with me on this whole, wild ride. You're all true warriors for reading the whole thing. I've been working on this for almost a year, and so I'm a little sad to see it done, but I'm glad it's reached its conclusion.
> 
> Many, many thanks to everyone who has left comments, kudos, and has subscribed and bookmarked. You are all amazing. Let's finish this! [muffled "Fly Me to the Moon" in the distance]

Ed wakes before his alarm and spends fifteen minutes or so staring at the ceiling of his bedroom before his phone begins bleating at him from his bedside table. He had been stirred awake by an unsettling, and incredibly vivid, dream, and found himself unable to fall back asleep. It's early fall, or it's supposed to be, and so the sun still steals into his room early, like a needy child, and hasn't yet retreated for the winter, and he had watched the bars of light that slipped between his blinds as they played along the carpet. There's an odd energy humming through his limbs, made even more unusual for this to be a Monday morning, a day usually reserved only for lethargy and caffeine headaches. The jittery feeling can't entirely be explained by it being the first day of school, either. Ed is fifteen; he had stopped being excited at the prospect of the first day of school ages ago.

Al, however, still does, and today even more so, because today is his first day of high school, and when Ed shuffles downstairs to the kitchen, he finds his brother already there, excitedly munching on a piece of toast, punctuated by enthusiastic gulps from a glass of orange juice.

"You're up early," Ed says, pulling a couple eggs out of the fridge and a skillet from underneath the oven.

"It's my first day of high school," Al says, spraying toast crumbs across the table, which he hastily wipes up. "I don't want to be late!"

"You won't be late," Ed assures him, dropping a small scoop of butter into the now-hot skillet. "Believe me. If I can't be late, then neither can you."

"If you say so," Al says incredulously. Ed supposes that, technically, he's smarter than his brother, but Al has an attitude of perfectionism and attention to detail that ends up leveling the playing field quite a bit. Ed, for as smart as he's always been, has always been too careless and impressively lazy.

After scrambling up the eggs, he drops them onto a plate and moves to the coffee maker, already full of the dark, rich coffee that his father always insisted upon buying. "If I have to deal with college freshman at 8:30 in the morning," he would always say, "then I'm not going to buy cheap coffee." Ed can't really complain, but he's also fifteen, and can't really taste the difference between the stuff his father buys and the stuff you get from the drive-through of most fast food restaurants.

"No offense, but you're looking a little out of it, brother," Al says, leaning onto the table with his forearms.

Ed considers lying and saying that he just doesn't want to go to school, which would be true, because he has his absolute least favorite teacher in the entire world for Advanced Placement Chemistry and he'd honestly rather die, but, upon considering that, he wonders why he would want to. What would lying about a stupid dream to his brother accomplish? 

"I had a really weird dream last night," he says, trying to sound as detached as possible. 

"Weird how?"

"Like...super involved weird," Ed attempts. "This dream spanned like...years. It covered from when we were little kids until now."

"So it was just memories?"

"No, not really. I mean, everyone we knew was there, but they were...different."

"In what way?"

He debates how much he should actually tell his brother, because the longer he thinks about it, the weirder it sounds. For starters, he and Al and _Winry Rockbell_ all lived with Ms. Hawkeye, the math teacher, but she wasn't a math teacher, she was a military captain, and specifically the captain of an organization that built giant robots that fought equally giant monsters that were trying to destroy the world. Plus, Armstrong, the gym teacher, and Mustang (the aforementioned Least Favorite Ever chemistry teacher) were pilots of said giant robots, and so was he. It was surreal, and dark, and frightening, and people kept _dying_. Hughes, the nice English teacher that gave Ed a B last year when he almost certainly deserved a B-, got _murdered_ , and Mustang died too. As much as he hates the guy, watching him get killed by a giant monster was still unsettling.

Of course, since Al hasn't actually met any of these people, since he hasn't started at the high school yet, Ed could only imagine what kind of first impressions they would make with Al having been told about their grisly deaths before ever meeting him.

And, perhaps, worst of all--

"Look at my two handsome boys," their mother says, sweeping into the kitchen. "Both of you are in high school now. I feel so old."

Their mother had been dead, too.

"Oh, come on, Mom, you're not _that_ old," Ed says, trying to break up some of the tension that only he feels.

Their mother places her hands on her hips, looking melodramatically offended. "You've got your father's way with words, Ed," she jokes, just as their father comes running through the kitchen, coffee thermos in hand.

"I can't believe you're running late on the first day of the semester," their mother says, watching as their father fumbles with the coffee maker. "Aren't you even going to eat breakfast?"

"Don't have time," he says, pouring the coffee into his thermos. "They only have to wait on me for fifteen minutes before they can leave, and I can't let that happen."

Their mother sighs, reaching for a plate full of no-bake cookies sitting on the breakfast bar and handing one to him. "I made these last night. You can eat it while you drive."

Their father looks to be on the verge of grateful tears as he says "You're an angel, Trisha."

She smiles, says "I know," and places a kiss on his cheek before waving him out the door.

"I swear," their mother says, pouring herself a cup of coffee before sitting down. "What would your father do without me?"

Al seems to have forgotten all about the dream, for which Ed is grateful. It's not exactly the most auspicious start to the school year.

A knock at the door pulls their mother up from the table again, and when she opens the door, Ed hears her say "Good morning, Winry. Happy first day of school!"

"Thank you," Winry says, slipping through the door. "Are you nerds ready to go?"

"Wow, that's hilarious coming from someone who asked for a Lego Robotics Kit for her birthday," Ed says with a smirk.

Winry's face colors angrily. "Well, at least I'm not taking AP Chemistry as a sophomore!"

Ed and Al's mother shakes her head. "Some things never change, I swear."

"Come on, brother," Al says, pushing back his chair and getting up from the table. "We should get going."

It's not an overly long walk to the high school from their house, but Al is right. "Alright, fine."

"Have a good day at school!" their mother calls from the kitchen as they leave.

"You're awfully dressed up, Winry," Al comments as they start their walk.

"You think so?" Winry asks. She's wearing a skirt and a top and knee-high socks that disappear into her high-top sneakers. Last year, you would've had to fight her tooth and nail to get her into anything that wasn't a sweatshirt and jeans. People used to think that Ed and Winry were twins, because they were about the same size, both had long, blonde hair, and tended to wear the same things. But now she looks different, older. She's taller than him (although, as loath as he is to admit it, she's always been a bit taller than him), and the skirt rests at her waist, hugging it with a kind of reverence that Ed thinks he shouldn't be noticing on his best friend.

And so he decides not to. "Yeah, Win, what the fuck? It's school, not a fucking date."

Winry's cheeks puff out in agitation, a gesture that Ed used to think made her look like a blowfish, but now, with her cheekbones accentuated by what might be blush and might just be her embarrassment, it almost looks... _cute_. What is up with him today?

"Oh, like you're some fashion expert?" Winry retorts. "You've had that same stupid red jacket since middle school, and you doodle skulls on all your binders with permanent marker."

"Yeah, because my jacket _is_ cool, and so are skulls!"

"Are you sure about that? Because I think I know of several girls who would think otherwise."

"What? What girls? Who have you been talking to about me?"

Al, standing between them, sighs the long-suffering sigh of their mother. "Guys, it's the first day of school. Could we not start it by getting into a fistfight before we even get there?"

"I'll stop fighting with Winry when she stops being stupid!"

"Ed, oh my god," Winry says, exasperated.

The walk continues like that, which makes it, oddly enough, perfectly normal. While they may bicker more now than they used to, Ed and Winry have always gone back and forth like this, and Al has always kept the neutral middle spot. Ed is excited that his brother is finally going to the same school as him. He would never admit it, but it was tough not having his brother there the last year. They're all together again, the Golden Trio, and if they can make it through the first day without killing each other or getting expelled, this year is going to be awesome.

* * *

"I will never understand the bizarre camaraderie between you guys," Rebecca says, sipping coffee at the small kitchen table of her and Riza's house. Rebecca had sworn that having a house as opposed to an apartment would separate them from all the other aimless college graduates in their town. They were adults now; Riza had an adult job, and Rebecca was sure to get one soon, surely. Because of her hours as a bartender, at present, she spends most of her days watching _Chopped_ on Netflix and going to the gym, which would drive Riza insane. She needs a job, a routine, to keep her head on her shoulders. "You'd think you had been through a war together or something."

Riza shrugs, placing all of her books into the canvas farmer's market bag she uses in lieu of a briefcase. She's not a briefcase kind of math teacher. She refuses to be that person. "We've been through a lot together, is all."

"I mean, I know. I was there." Riza and Rebecca and Roy and Maes had all gone through college together, and three of them had ended up going into education. Not by choice, either. They had all wanted to go into academia for their respective disciplines, but the fear of accruing more student loan debt and the viciousness of the academic job market had scared them enough to fall back on a plan B. Maes is working on a literature master's program currently at the local university, and one day he'll probably find himself at a cushy liberal arts college teaching rich kids about Dante. For now, though, he's stuck trying to get middle class kids to care about Shakespeare. 

"But of all people to place your unwavering faith in," Rebecca continues, "you pick _Roy Mustang_." She makes a face like she had just bitten down on a lime wedge. 

"I wouldn't exactly call it _unwavering faith_."

"He's a jackass, Riza," Rebecca says, dropping all pretense. "And he's just going to take advantage of you--"

"I'm driving him to work, not signing over my firstborn. He totaled his car over the summer, and I don't think it'd make a great impression on the kids if their chemistry teacher took an Uber to work."

"Yeah, but why couldn't Maes take him?"

"Because Maes has to drop his daughter off at school. Honestly, Becca, it'll be fine. I'm making him pay gas money."

"Yeah, you better. Make him pay double." 

"No," Riza says curtly, filling up her tumbler with coffee and screwing the lid on tightly.

"Sorry, Riza, but you know I don't like him."

"Really?" Riza says drily. "I hadn't noticed."

Rebecca sticks out her tongue. "Go to work, loser."

"Love you too, Becca."

She knows that Rebecca's distaste for Roy comes from a place of concern, but it's frustrating nonetheless. Still, she supposes that she wouldn't be overly fond of Roy either if the first time they met involved Roy vomiting in her kitchen sink. Roy, Riza likes to say, is an acquired taste, an honestly baffling cocktail of hopeless nerd, unrepentant social climber, insufferable know-it-all, urbane playboy, and genuinely kind and caring friend. What combinations and ratios those traits present themselves in is subject to change, and probably are to blame for why he's managed to make more enemies than friends. But still, Roy has been as steadfast a friend to Riza as Rebecca has been. He may be an idiot who totaled his car and now depends on her for transportation, but he's still her friend.

When she arrives at his apartment, he comes out looking a tad worse for wear, eyes shadowed by dark circles and hair rumpled.

"What happened to you?" 

"I was up all night reading articles on JSTOR."

"The night before the first day of the school year? That was stupid."

"I'm reaching my breaking point, Riza. I have another class with Elric this semester, and I honestly don't know if I'm strong enough to deal with that again. I need to get into a PhD program and get out of here."

"He's a bit..." Riza searches for a diplomatic adjective. It's not in her nature to speak disparagingly of children. After all, they aren't really people yet, and so most of the time their unfortunate behavior is a side-effect of their age. "... _gregarious_ , but he's always been fine in my classes."

"That little hellion is going to be the death of me, I swear."

Roy doesn't really have the temperament for teaching high school. He had grand aspirations of being a real public intellectual, the kind who sells out lecture halls on arcane topics and crafts a reputation for being eccentric and brilliant. The economy didn't particularly nurture those ambitions, and so now he's poor and miserable like every other person in Amestris who had graduated college in the last decade. While Riza doesn't get any joy out of watching her friend suffer, she does think that it's a bit funny that his comeuppance has materialized in the form of a fifteen-year-old with a ponytail.

"Did you find any good articles?" Riza asks, trying to direct his thoughts to something a little more productive than the murder of children.

"Not really. It's terrible; I have so much passion for this subject, but I can't find anything that really grabs me enough to write a dissertation on it. I want to research _everything_."

She can get why Rebecca doesn't like him, honestly. The kind of zest he has for everything, combined with his near-constant, vocal dissatisfaction with the world ends up making being around him similar to dealing with a stir-crazy child. 

"Well, you can't research everything," Riza says evenly.

"I know that," he grumbles. "Why can't we all be like Maes and weirdly into seventeenth-century poetry?"

"Because then the world would be a miserable place indeed."

She's happy for Maes; truly, she is. It's just that looking at someone who is so thoroughly content and satisfied with their life throws all the myriad ways in which she _isn't_ into even starker relief. Sometimes she wakes up from dreams shaking with a kind of excess energy that has no outlet, and no amount of running on the treadmill can get rid of it. She feels like she's wasting her life, and one day she'll wake up old, and all her youth will have been spent on nothing. 

She knows that this kind of feeling is unwarranted. She should be grateful that she even _has_ a job in the first place. So what if she's not changing the world? So what if she'll never do anything that'll get her written down in history books? Her life is stable. Stability is good.

* * *

"How was school?" Winry's mother asks, sweeping into the house. Winry's amazed; normally her parents don't get back from the clinic this early. She says as much.

Her father smiles. "I figured that the clinic could handle itself without us for a night. I thought we could all have dinner together for once."

Winry beams. She had already started making dinner for herself and her grandmother, but doubling up the ingredients wouldn't be much extra work. "That sounds perfect," she says.

Her grandmother is in the garage, souping up an old car that she's planning to sell once it's finished. Retirement has let her work only on the projects she cares about, which means that Winry has been able to watch her build things practically from the ground up. She wants to be half as capable as Pinako when she's old.

"What are you making?" Winry's father asks, sniffing at the air. "It smells amazing."

"Granny's stew," she says, adding a few spices to the already simmering pot.

Her father makes a happy noise. "My favorite! It's almost like you knew we'd be here."

"I didn't, honestly," Winry says. "But I kind of hoped, I guess."

Once dinner is ready, Winry's father runs off to get Pinako from the garage, and Winry's mother helps her set the table.

"I'm sorry we're gone so much," she says, flattening out a napkin next to a bowl.

"Wow, where did that come from?" Winry asks, giggling a bit uncomfortably. 

"Just something your dad and I have been thinking about recently. Sometimes it feels like we didn't really get to watch you grow up. But today, when we saw you leave for school this morning, it's like we woke up and you were already a woman."

Winry straightens a spoon that is already perfectly parallel to the wood grain in the table. "I'd hardly call myself a _woman_."

"Either way," her mother continues, "we're proud of you. I don't know if we get to say that enough."

Small spots on the table begin to darken. When Winry reaches out to touch one, her finger comes away wet. 

"Winry, are you alright?"

Winry reaches up to touch her face, and finds the same wetness there. She's crying, and she isn't entirely sure why. After all, she's happy. She never feels hugely neglected by her parents, but it can be lonely not seeing them much. But she isn't overwhelmed enough by happiness that she should be crying. And yet, deep in her core is something melancholy and cold, something that doesn't make any sense, but which she can't shake, like a memory of a dream. 

Winry smiles. "I'm just happy."

* * *

Maes takes pity on him and invites him over for dinner once a week. Gracia is a stellar cook, and they usually pop open a bottle of wine and talk shit about the school, how it's being run well or poorly, which students they hate, things like that. It's a comfortable ritual, and a pleasant change of pace from the garbage he eats living with Havoc. It's something he looks forward to, and something that doesn't change much week to week, which is why it is so surprising to step out of Maes's sensible hatch-back, walk into his house, and find Riza already there, nursing a glass of wine and playing with Elicia.

Roy isn't an idiot; he knows that Riza has her own life. But still, it's always odd for something she does to catch him off-guard, like he should have paid more attention.

"Hi, Riza," he says, trying to temper his surprise into the cool tone he tries to keep most of the time.

She takes a sip from the wine and sets it on an end-table. She's seated on the carpet, Elicia sitting in front of her, toying with her hair-clip.

"Oh, hello, Roy," she says, eyes still fixed on Elicia, most likely trying to make sure that the child doesn't break her favorite accessory.

"I'm going to check and see how my lovely wife is faring in the kitchen," Maes says brightly, squeezing past him.

"How are you?" He asks, sitting beside her. He had been dropped off at his apartment by her only a handful of hours before, but it still seems weird not to offer some pleasantries.

She doesn't respond immediately, and he watches as her fair brows constrict over her eyes, as if trying to decide what to say. What she settles on isn't what he expects. "I've been feeling kind of weird all day."

This is unusual for Riza. He's fairly sure that she's never taken a sick day, and her moods are always fairly level, never overwhelmingly good or bad. It's rare for her to express distress.

"Are you getting sick?"

"No, not weird that way. Just kind of...off."

Elicia tires of the hair clip and sets it aside before deciding on more fruitful avenues for entertainment and turning to Roy. "Can I see your phone, Uncle Roy?"

Normally, he'd say no, but he's powerless whenever she calls him "Uncle Roy."

"Just this once, okay?"

Elicia grins toothily and Riza lets out a breathy laugh as he hands over his practically brand-new, very expensive, very _fragile_ phone to a three-year-old. If she breaks it, it'll be his own damn fault.

"How do you mean 'off'?" Roy asks. It's not like her to get into a funk, and she's not prone to the same extremes of mood that he has. 

"I don't know," she says, voice bearing its trademark calm, but uncharacteristically distant. "Have you ever known you've forgotten something, but you just can't remember what it is?"

"Yeah, all the time," he says with a laugh. He's notoriously absentminded among the administration, often going months without doing paperwork. At least some of that is laziness, but some of it is also just forgetfulness.

"It's like that," she explains. "It's just there, at the back of my mind, but I don't know what it is. I didn't leave the oven on; I paid my rent; I went grocery shopping; I did my laundry. I have no idea what I could've forgotten."

Roy doesn't either. Riza is a hard task-master and rarely forgets things. It isn't like her to get hung up on something so small.

"You're probably just imagining things," he offers. "I very seriously doubt that you of all people could have forgotten something."

She flicks her eyes, deep brown and inscrutable, away from Elicia to look at him. "What's that supposed to mean?"

Shit. It really hasn't been Roy's month; first he totals his car, conscripting Riza to be his chauffeur until he gets a new one, and now it looks like he's somehow managed to offend her over something stupid. And he won't be fooled by the look of utter absorption that Elicia is giving his phone, which is playing nursery rhyme YouTube videos at top volume; she's as observant as her dad, and will likely run off to him at some point to report that Uncle Roy was being an ass. Well, not in those exact words, but something to that effect, at least.

"It's just that you're so on top of things," he says. "It isn't like you to forget stuff."

She looks at him for a moment, unblinking, as if waiting for him to say something else, and then looks away, down at where Elicia is watching something about a "finger family." "Yeah," Riza says. "Maybe you're right."

"Soup's on!" Maes calls blithely from the kitchen, and Roy reaches over to where Elicia still has his phone.

"Okay, kiddo, I'm gonna need that back."

"But, Uncle Roy..." She says, voice beginning to wobble, and Roy really can't handle pissing another girl off today, and so he sighs.

"Fine. But it's not my fault if your parents don't like it."

Her parents don't like it, and as soon as they sit down the phone is confiscated and returned to its rightful owner.

Dinner is lovely, although Riza is even quieter than usual. They talk about their classes, hedging bets for who will be the best and worst students to deal with this year. Roy complains loudly about Edward Elric, although Maes swears up and down that his younger brother is an absolute delight. 

Roy is getting settled for a long evening of complaining, but after dessert is finished, Riza pushes her chair back from the table and stands. "I should probably get going."

"Oh, come on, Riza," Maes protests. "You hardly ever come over. Let your hair down; stay a while."

"My hair _is_ down," she says. "Speaking of which, I believe Elicia still has my hair clip."

"Is that true, Elicia?" Gracia asks.

Elicia nods, reaching into the pocket of her dungarees and retrieving it. 

"Thank you very much, Elicia," Riza says, causing Elicia to demur sheepishly. They all watch as Riza sweeps her hair up and secures it. "I'll be going, then. Thank you for dinner; it was lovely." And then, just as unexpectedly as she had arrived, she's gone.

"Why won't that woman let herself have any fun?" Maes asks. "She's been like this since we were in college. You'd think she would have grown out of it by now."

Roy doesn't say so, but Maes is mistaken. Riza _can_ have fun, but it just doesn't present itself how you would expect. Her smiles are small, but genuine, and she has a remarkably loud, unbecoming laugh when you catch her off-guard with something funny. It would take a practiced observer, though, to notice that something is off with her. Roy had never really considered it, but supposes that's what he is now.

"You're staying, right?" Maes asks.

"I sort of have to," Roy says. "You're my ride."

They spend the rest of the evening chitchatting about nothing in particular, although Riza's strange behavior sits heavily at the back of his mind. It really shouldn't; it's not entirely unusual to forget things, but it is unusual for something to unsettle Riza this much. Eventually, Gracia bids them goodnight to put Elicia down, leaving Roy and Maes alone in the living room, and giving Maes clearance to talk about things no one else cares about since he has a captive audience.

"So, for my master's program--"

Roy groans, slumping down in his chair.

"What?"

"I hate to break it to you, Hughesie, but nobody cares about seventeenth-century poetry."

"Well, I do!"

"Congrats: you're the only one."

It's not that Roy hates poetry in general. In fact, there's some he quite likes, and he was forced to read a lot of it by his foster mother in a bid to instill some culture in him as a boy. But it's just that his best and dearest friend somehow managed to find the single most boring specialization possible, which, coupled with a zeal to talk about it constantly, is going to be the death of Roy.

"There's some great stuff in there, I swear," Maes says. "I've been rereading all this stuff to try and come up with thesis topics, and it's honestly amazing. Have you read any John Donne?"

Roy groans again, this time louder.

"I swear, you're like talking to a toddler. And one that isn't Elicia, either. Hang on." Maes gets up and walks to one of the many bookshelves that line the walls of their living room, grabbing a thick anthology off one of the shelves and bringing it over. "I'll read you one."

"Must you?" Roy asks weakly.

"I'm driving you back to your apartment, so yes. You can listen to one poem as payment."

"Okay, fine," Roy says, straightening up in his chair. "Go on."

Maes's voice, which takes on a chirpy, nasal quality whenever he talks too fast, mellows whenever he reads poetry, something that Roy has heard him do countless times. It drops into a register he doesn't use often, sounding almost somber, and something about it, combined with the words of the poem themselves, makes the hair on Roy's arms prickle.

 _Busy old fool, unruly sun,  
     Why dost thou thus  
Through windows and through curtains call on us?  
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?  
     Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide  
     Late schoolboys and sour prentices,  
__Go tell court huntsmen that the king will ride,_  
  _Call country ants to harvest offices;_  
_Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,_  
_Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time._

 _Thy beams, so reverend and strong_  
_Why shouldst thou think?_  
_I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink._  
_But that I would not lose her sight so long;_  
_If her eyes have not blinded thine,_  
_Look, and tomorrow late, tell me,_  
_Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine_  
_Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with me._  
_Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,_  
_And thou shalt hear, All here in one bed lay._

 _She is all states, and all princes, I,  
     Nothing else is.  
Princes do but play us; compared to this,  
All honor's mimic, all wealth alchemy.  
     Thou, sun, art half as happy as we,  
     In that the world's contracted thus;  
__Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be_  
  _To warm the world, that's done in warming us._  
_Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere._  
_This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere._

"You look me in the face and tell me that isn't a great fucking poem," Maes says, grinning smugly, closing the thick book emphatically.

Roy wishes he could, but he can't. Not because the poem is good, necessarily--Roy knows good poetry about as well as he knows the Drachman alphabet--but because something about it feels _familiar,_ like he's heard it before, which can't possibly be true. Even in school, he can guarantee they never read this, and even if they did, Roy didn't, because he had the tendency to do his chemistry homework in literature classes. And yet it fills him with what he can only describe as déjà vu. 

"You okay?" Maes asks. "I expected the poem to touch you, but you look like you might've been touched a little too much."

"It's, um," Roy stammers, voice strained. "It's very good, you're right."

Maes proceeds on a rant about the artistic and academic merits of seventeenth-century poetry, but Roy isn't listening. The poem is still rattling around his skull like a song stuck in his head, but not the whole thing. Only four lines: 

      _She is all states, and all princes I,_  
      _Nothing else is._  
_Princes do but play us; compared to this,  
All honor's mimic, all wealth alchemy._

He knows he can't have heard it before, but he feels those lines like he had written them himself. He thinks about Riza's big ocher eyes and how they had looked at him as if looking for something, some confirmation, with a look he couldn't really describe at the moment, but which he now understands.

He feels like he's forgotten something.

* * *

The summer just won't go away. It's lingering like a rude houseguest, the kind of simile that Ed is surprised his mind leaps to, because they don't ever have houseguests, and he isn't really one for similes. Ed hates the summer; everything is sticky and gross and because he likes to wear his hair long, it's like he can't ever get cool enough.

They've got all the windows in the house open, trying to let in some of the night air, but it's like the sun refuses to go down, daylight sticking to the sky longer than feels natural. It's the longest summer they've had in years, and news outlets are all crying global warming. But it's not necessarily the heat that has Ed the most uncomfortable so much as what it makes him feel. For lack of a better word, it makes him feel nostalgic, something he thinks that he's too young to feel, but he feels it nonetheless, in the thick, sweet air that comes stealing through the windows and how it leaves trails of condensation on the window panes. It's the kind of weather that makes people lazy, which is not entirely conducive to doing one's homework. But if the sun isn't going to do its job and go down, then he isn't either.

"Don't you think this weather is weird, Al?" He asks, lying flat on his back on Al's bedroom floor, staring at the sky through his open window, fading from hot blue to an orange the color of marmalade. 

"Weird how?" Al asks, flipping aimlessly through his book for literature.

"Like...unnatural weird."

"I mean, global warming is screwing up everything," Al replies.

"It's not just that though. It's like it doesn't feel real."

"I think the word you're looking for is 'surreal,'" Al supplies, and Ed tosses a sock at him.

"Thanks for the ACT word, asshole."

"I can sort of see what you mean, though," Al says. "It should be fall by now, shouldn't it?"

Ed feels like there's something on the tip of his tongue, some word he's forgotten but is very close to remembering, but the weather makes his tongue heavy.  He hadn't slept well, and now all he wants to do is sleep, but the thought won't stop nagging him. This shouldn't be bothering him like this. Nothing should be bothering him. Sure, he almost threw a beaker at Mr. Mustang, and Winry is acting weird around him, but it was still a good day. He and his brother go to the same school now, and the days are still warm, and he should be happy, but it's like there's a perpetual rock in his shoe, something that keeps him from being comfortable. No, comfortable isn't the word. Satisfied. It's like nothing he does lets him be satisfied.

"I like this weather, though," Al continues. "It always reminds me of when we were kids, for some reason."

Unbidden, images from Ed's dream flash through his mind, of him and Al, smaller than they are now, trapped under a burning house. Of Winry's parents, killed in some skirmish. Of his arm and leg, gone, replaced with gleaming metal. He looks down at his right hand and curls the fingers in until his nails rest against the meat of his palm. Something about the gesture doesn't feel right, like he's waiting on the sound of metal against metal.

The feeling comes all at once, like a wave, but once it hits it's impossible to ignore and impossible to explain away: this isn't real, and he knows this as surely as he knows who he is, as he knows that Al is his brother. He stands up suddenly, perhaps a little too suddenly, because the blood rushing to his head adds to the dizziness he already feels. He feels like he's been shot in the chest.

"Ed?" Al asks, lowering his book.

"I need to go talk to Mom," Ed says. 

"Oh, okay," Al replies. "Can you bring me some milk when you come back up?"

"Sure," Ed says. He knows that the boy he's looking at is Alphonse, but not _his_ Alphonse. This Alphonse hasn't experienced any of the things that he has, any of the tragedy, any of the sadness, which is wonderful, but it's not true. They haven't turned out the same as they did back home, no one has. They can't have this; it just doesn't feel genuine.

Their mother is downstairs doing dishes, hair blowing slightly from the breeze coming in through the window over the kitchen sink. 

"Mom," Ed calls, and she turns over her shoulder, her ponytail coming unstuck from its position and falling down between her shoulder blades.

"What is it, Ed?" She asks, eyes full of the casual concern that parents always feel for their children.

"This isn't real, is it?"

Her hands stop what they were doing, and her mouth opens slightly, like she is considering asking him what he means, but decides against it.

"I wouldn't say it's not real," she says. "It's real, it's just new."

"But nothing's the same," he says, voice rising in urgency.

"Of course not," she says, drying her hands. "You've lived very different lives in this world, all of you. Better lives. You're happy."

"But I'm not, though," he protests. "It just doesn't feel right."

"Why don't you want to be happy?" Trisha asks, face drawn. "You can have this if you want it, a world where you and the people you love only suffer the normal amount that humans suffer, where you don't have to constantly worry about the world falling down around your ears."

"But living like that made me who I am," Ed says. "It made them who they are." The lights in the kitchen cut out, and the walls of their house disappear with them. He's back in the darkness of the philosopher's stone, all of his friends standing in front of him in a line the way he remembers them: Riza in her heavy boots, a thigh holster visible under her skirt; Mustang in his plug suit, looking braver than anyone should look in something as silly as that; Winry in her cover-alls, covered in grease and oil but all the more radiant for it; Al in his Garfiel's uniform, with tired eyes but a real, vital smile.

"But why would you want them to suffer?" Trisha asks.

"I don't. But there's no such thing as a painless lesson, and we've all learned our fair share of lessons."

"And so you would give up everything you had made for that?" She doesn't sound angry at him, but she does sound confused, and a little sad.

"Not all of it," Ed says. He looks at his mother, regarding him with large, sorrowful blue eyes. "After all, if I have the power to remake the universe completely, changing a couple of things should be a piece of cake, right?" 

"Ed," Trisha says, "the world is a mess. There's no end to the things you would need to change."

"The world may be a mess," Ed says, "but it's still mine."

* * *

The first thing Riza notices upon waking is the sound of water lapping against a shore, followed by the feeling of sand against her hands. She sits up, and sees herself looking at the ocean, in all its red, bloody glory. She had read books written before any of this had happened, about the smell of the ocean being salty and fresh, the kind of thing people longed for, but now it smells like metal, like a rusty building after it rains. She remembers what Martina had told her, that the stuff in the oceans was the same stuff that ran Alchemists, that made up homunculi, that went into making a philosopher's stone. Sometimes the world feels like one big, complicated transmutation of which she's only one, minute ingredient.

She scans the horizon and sees something else lying in the sand next to her. It is the very last thing she had expected to see, and so it takes her a moment to register what precisely it is. 

It's Roy. Lying next to her on the beach is Roy, whole, in his plug suit. Not cremated, but whole, still with skin, and hair, and eyelashes. 

Heart hammering against her ribs, she reaches over and gently runs a knuckle over his cheekbone and watches with wonder as his eyes flutter behind his eyelids. His eyes open.

She wants to say something, but it's like her knowledge of language has disappeared completely. There are no words for this. No one has ever needed them before.

He reaches a closed fist up to her, and she watches as he uncurls his fingers to reveal her hair-clip. She had forgotten that she had given it to him before heading to Aerugo. He had hung onto it all this time?

She takes it gingerly from his palm and holds it up, looking at the way the sun, coming in thin beams from behind black clouds, lights up the translucent parts of the tortoise-shell. She's sure that the PSL has matted her hair, and it could probably use a clip, but it no longer feels like what she should do. And so she closes her fingers around it, reares her arm back, and launches it into the sea. It makes a small, satisfying sound as it connects with the ocean, and sinks quickly to the bottom.

He looks at her, slightly confused, before letting out a laugh, loud, the kind that starts in your belly and burbles out of your throat, the kind she hasn't heard in what feels like years. The laugh startles her so much that she can't help but laugh too. She can't deny that the situation is a little bit hilarious, the two of them, looking like they're soaked in blood, laughing at the end of the world.

She laughs until her face aches and her eyes burn with tears. After they have quieted down, she looks at Roy, lying serenely on the sand, and she smiles.

Somehow, despite everything that has happened, despite the ocean being the color of blood and their city being reduced to ashes, she has the distinct feeling that everything is going to be alright. He is here and so is she; how could the world be anything but fine?

She watches as Roy reaches a hand up to run his fingers through a strand of her hair, slowly, reverently, from root to tip.

 _Yes,_ she thinks, and she feels it deep in her bone marrow, in the chambers of her heart. _Everything is going to be alright._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those who don't know, JSTOR is a database of scholarly journal articles.
> 
> The poem that Hughes reads is "The Sun Rising," by John Donne.
> 
> Chapter title, like last time, is from "All Delighted People," by Sufjan Steven


End file.
